House of Commons - Culture, Media and Sport

Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport Minutes of Evidence

Memorandum submitted by The Reading Agency

WHO WE ARE

The Reading Agency is a development agency for public libraries' work with readers. We are a charity, were created by merging three smaller agencies and came into being in 2002. Our main areas of work—all with an emphasis on innovation—are policy, research, advocacy, partnerships and national library programmes.

We are experimenting with interventionist approaches to give readers a much better, more relevant library service, and to support libraries in gearing up to be able to act as a national network, innovate to improve local services and respond fast to changing agendas. We are revenue funded by Arts Council England and CILIP.

We are increasingly acting as the interface agency for national partners wanting to connect with libraries' reading work. We led libraries' involvement with the BBC Big Read and are now leading the negotiations for a major three year partnership between libraries and BBC Learning. Other partners include C4, the major publishers, the Open University, National Youth Agency, Orange, Unilever, Arts and Business and the National Literacy Trust.

We are developing models which combine local authority activity into powerful national programmes to give users a much better service, create national economies of scale and raise libraries' profile. Six years ago we started a national summer reading challenge which is now the biggest national promotion of children's reading.

We are finding that it is possible to act as a catalyst for change by working alongside, but not in local authority structures or library bodies. We work in a close partnership with the profession, developing together local ownership of innovation and national approaches.

Our evidence submission focuses mainly on what can be done to increase the public's use of local libraries. It also covers models of provision and new policy demands.

SOME AMBITIONS

We would like to see libraries:

— put reading at the heart of planning the modern library offer;

— linking their work with readers much more strongly to the People's Network to provide reader focused content, services and resources;

— make a limited number of powerful, clear offers to the nation, based on what they can do that no other institution can, on policy relevance and on people's needs. Market these offers powerfully and creatively to bring in new audiences;

— through national development programmes, locally delivered, make sure that users wherever they live can get a minimum level of provision;

— build reach, capacity, muscle and a buzz about reading through national partnerships that reach new readers, provide new resources and plug readers in to a vibrant reading scene;

— harness the advocacy potential of high level partnerships to build a more contemporary image for libraries;

— use their reading base to work much more closely with the public in shaping the modern library service;

— make the skills to deal with readers well part of every member of staff's job description and a core element of a librarian training; and

— adopt a much wider range of impact measures for the value of their work with readers.

We would like to see Government:

— signal reading as a priority for a public libraries, including work with socially excluded audiences;

— take a lead on prioritizing strategic national programmes and target audiences for libraries;

— lead the process of rolling out current national offer thinking on the ground;

— raise the profile across government of the public library contribution through reading to policy priorities, and integrate libraries in planning and funding. Every Child Matters, the Shared Priorities, The Youth Green Paper, Skills for Life, and work on creativity and cultural entitlement are obvious areas;

— ensure libraries' reading services are fully integrated in the new structures created by Every Child Matters; and

— actively support research and intellectual debate into the value of reading and the impact of libraries' work with readers.

1. READING AT THE HEART OF THE MODERN LIBRARY OFFER

During the last 20 years libraries have spread themselves very thinly, feeling they must be all things to all people and running the risk of neglecting one of their main audiences—readers. Lacking a shared national clarity of purpose they have been unable to market themselves effectively, and have become all but invisible on the national political scene.

As Philip Pullman says, "reading is the greatest achievement of human democracy".[1] It plays a central role in the nation's cultural, learning, spiritual and community life. Libraries' reading services create equal access to all the things it brings. Market research shows that what people most want from their library is a quality reading service.[2]

It is true that book issues are down, and that the trends are worrying. But libraries still have a massive interface with the reading audience and that the work is changing to become much more interventionist, impacting on major policy areas. Through their work with readers, libraries are rediscovering their radical sense of social purpose. Measuring the value of this work only by book issues and worrying about losing audiences who can now afford to buy their books is missing the point (although these audiences often want to be part of libraries' imaginative community based reading events and activities). Work with socially excluded audiences is intensive and resource heavy, but can make a real difference to people whose lack of engagement with reading spoils their life chances.

In the new world of internet bookselling and the expansion of bookshops, it would be unrealistic to expect borrowing figures to remain at the same level. Libraries are not just a subsidised bookshop chain and straight comparison with the bookshop model is misleading. The debate about libraries' future role in the nation's reading life needs to move to a new level, based on a better understanding of the special way they can encourage reading in all sections of society.

Some examples of the value of libraries' increasingly interventionist work with readers:

— Getting books to babies so they do better when they start school:

— Providing reading services which help the isolated and elderly feel better:

— Developing social skills and confidence through library reading activities:

— Building community cohesion and new networks through sharing reading:

To reinvigorate public libraries we need to build on the distinctive contribution they can make to the nation. Putting reading work centre stage makes sense because no other agency works with readers with the same mixture of free access, and support for personal development. No other agency is as well placed to get the benefits of reading to the disenfranchised.

"We need to connect with those special qualities that public libraries can bring to children's reading—inspiration, freedom, motivation—if we are to release the full potential of the National Literacy Strategy" Neil McClelland, National Literacy Trust

Putting reading at the heart of the modern public library service also builds on the energy and innovation in the library service. There have been some impressive developments in the last few years, and libraries are organizing themselves better to deliver reading services that make a real difference to people's lives. The Society of Chief Librarians has just agreed a mission statement for libraries' work with readers, with a shared set of aims which range from creating equal opportunities for everyone to read for pleasure to work with partners to raise levels of literacy. Interventionist reading services now feature in library services' planning, and increasingly staffing structures reflect this. Regional approaches to organizing reading based work are improving.

In the last 10 years there has been an explosion of innovative work—with socially excluded groups like children in care, with experimental reader choice software, with new partners. But much of the innovation is project based, patchy and lacks co-ordinated planning to achieve economies of scale. There is a real challenge to use what has been learnt over the last 10 years to mainstream the innovative work and focus on some key goals and target audiences.

Getting a library workforce that is clear it is working in the inspiring and creative field of reading would be part of the answer to recruitment and staff motivation. There are already two national reading focused work force development programmes aiming to change staff skills[7] and it is extraordinary to watch the change that happens to staff when they take responsibility for this invigorating work. It is also clear that very different kinds of people are needed, with different skills—animateurs, interpreters, people in touch with the writing community, people with partnership building skills. Outward facing reading focused work like reading groups has a direct input to staff development.

In The Rise of the Creative Class Richard Florida[8] argues that it is now people in creative jobs who are the ones regenerating neighbourhoods. It's scientists, architects, writers who are building community spirit and attracting new investment. We need to get library staff on that list—to have young people queuing up to work for libraries because they're vibrant, contemporary, socially powerful places and because libraries are community champions of reading, seen to be creating social capital by using reading to help people learn, get involved in the arts and the community, feel better about themselves.

2. CONSISTENT READING OFFERS TO THE PUBLIC

Framework for the Future challenges libraries to create "national services available in every library". This would clarify what people can expect from their library, and make it possible for libraries to market themselves much better. We agree wholeheartedly with this approach.

During the first year of the Framework for the Future action plan we and others have been working on national programmes which would build on reading and learning areas where libraries are already strong, where it is a realistic ambition to aim for these services being offered in 100% of library authorities.

These national programmes could be the basis for a radical transformation of the library service. They would develop services that can be marketed nationally, and which would have an impact on national patterns of learning, literacy, community development and cultural engagement.

They would identify priority areas everyone agreed to work on together, enabling libraries to communicate clearly, on a national scale, with users and non users about would they can expect and make sure they get it wherever they live. These programmes would create economies of scale and raise standards by sharing good practice. Libraries would gain national clout and attract additional investment.

The decision about which national programmes needs to made against an analysis of what people in local communities need, libraries' distinctive strengths and the policy background. What do users tell us they want? What can libraries deliver that no-one else can? Which areas of work should libraries focus on to help achieve our national ambitions?

MLA and the teams doing this national offer work in first year of the Framework for the Future action plan have identified five key audiences and benefits in the area of reading and learning, from early years to adult learning. We are closely involved in work on the offer to children out of school hours, basic skills learners, young people and mainstream adult readers. The work has been underpinned by consultation with users, visioning, policy audits, research and mapping.[9]

Readers groups: national development programme for libraries work. www.readingagency.org.uk/html/whatwedo03.cfm?loc =projectS&projectID=43

Adult basic skills learners: www.readingagency.org.uk/html/whatwedo03.cfm?loc=projectS&projectID=40

An example of a national reading offer

To take one as an example—support for children's reading and learning in the breaks from school. Here libraries' "unique selling points" are strong and clear. Libraries are the only place where children and families have free access to books and creative reading based activities in the holidays. In terms of the shared priority to raise standards in school there's a crucial job to be done in keeping literacy levels up during the long summer break, and libraries can use this time to connect children with inspiring reading that will turn them into readers for life.

We are not starting from scratch. The summer reading challenge is a real library success story. It is now offered through 91% of UK library authorities, involves 620,000 children and creates 35,000 new library members every year. DfES has recently recognized the importance of the scheme by providing funding to strengthen its delivery.

A love of reading is powerful lever for social change as OECD's 2002 Reading for Change research showed,[10] and new summer reading challenge research[11] shows how libraries' "reading for pleasure" work boosts children's confidence and enjoyment of reading:

— 96% of participants enjoyed reading the books;

— 98% liked choosing books for themselves;

— 95% want to read lots more books; and

— 75% felt they were "better readers" after the challenge.

"Well I never used to understand books or ever liked to read them but I like them now and I understand them and I'm even reading a big long book"

"My daughter who is four and a half, had reached an impasse in learning to read. The challenge has motivated her to read her first books, so far she has read four and she should manage the six to finish the challenge. It has made a huge difference to my daughter's reading confidence as she makes the transition from nursery school to the reception class of her new school. With many thanks again."

The challenge creates national economies of scale which massively enhances the experience children have—libraries can share best practice nationally and use materials which compete with credibility for children's attention. It is an important model because it was built from the bottom up—by national co-ordination of excellent local work.

ACHIEVING MORE NATIONAL OFFERS

This is just one example of a building block for getting to a position where libraries can make a clear, valuable national offer to targeted groups, offering interventionist support at key life stages. There are others where service development is advanced like early years and study support. Planning for the regional piloting of these offers is now under way.

3. PARTNERSHIPS

Partnerships are crucial to the future of the library service. They drive new audiences into libraries, build their profile, create new advocates and develop staff. At national level they can create economies of scale with local benefit, and for readers they can bring a buzz and relevance to libraries' work that they really appreciate:

Our reading group has been working with the Orange Prize and say they have been enjoying: discovering new authors and books we wouldn't have found without the prize; feeling part of a countrywide consensus via the libraries; our feeling of being at the cutting edge"

Through our reading based partnerships, we are aiming to change the library landscape radically and give libraries a massive profile boost. In the field of reading there has been a rapid development of nationally co-ordinated partnerships, partly driven by an explosion of media interest in harnessing people's passion for books. We have been working hard to ride this rollercoaster to get the best for libraries and their readers.

This table below uses data from partnerships The Reading Agency has led, and shows the growth of both the range of partnerships and the extent of local authority involvement in them. The implications for a more vibrant, contemporary library experience are obvious.


	2002	2003	2004

No of Projects	5	8	11
% of local authority participation	66%	58%	74%
BBC Big Read		100%
Booker	36%	60%
Chatterbooks children's reading groups	31%	45%	52%
Daily Mail Book Club *still growing			51%
National Poetry Day *still growing			61%
Orange	45%	73%	79%
Penguin Good Booking			62%
C4's Richard and Judy Summer Reads			79%
Radio 4 (2004 *still growing)	42%		73%
Summer Reading Challenge	78%	87%	91%
WH Smith People's Choice		18%	65%
World Book Day		84%	97%

We have recently done a partnerships review, the main recommendations of which were endorsed by the Advisory Council for Libraries this September. This means we will be leading the sector's main reading based partnerships and developing a three year partnership programme through which libraries will develop a stronger position on agreed negotiating terms. There will be a structure that makes sure partners get a quality deal and that allows each library service to commit to different levels of involvement to get the most local benefit.

There are some exciting recent partnership developments.

Partnership with the BBC

Imagine the public value created by a strategic, long term partnership between libraries and the BBC. Their broadcasting muscle combined with libraries' powerful community presence to create a mixture of broadcast, on line and community based reading and learning opportunities.

Libraries have worked with the BBC productively for years. But the Big Read saw a step change because it involved the whole library network and wove together broadcasting and community based reading activities right across the UK. The Reading Agency led the library sector's involvement.

We have had refreshingly honest partnership discussions with the BBC to build on what we learnt in The Big Read. We are now leading negotiations for a major three year partnership with BBC Learning, working with MLA and the Society of Chief Librarians. The partnership will make the public library network a strategic partner in every big BBC Learning campaign—whether that's parenting, literacy or music. We hope to announce details early in the new year.

Meanwhile we have established an initiative to build a partnership between public libraries, BBC Radio 4 and Children's Radio. There will be a year's experimental pilot, autumn 2004-05, funded by MLA and Arts Council England. Ideas being developed include listening posts in libraries, connecting readers to reading based radio material; getting a strong flow of grassroots library users contributing to radio programmes; linking Radio 7's children's programming to libraries' summer reading challenge.

Publisher partnerships

"We've spent too long consigning libraries to the past, when suddenly it's becoming clear that they have a big part to play in our future. Across our industry a spirit of partnership is opening up new possibilities for books." Anthony Forbes-Watson, Chief Executive of Penguin Group at the 2004 Bookseller Association conference

Reading Partners is a new partnership consortium trying to improve the experience adult readers have of libraries by revolutionising the way public libraries and publishers work together. We are working with seven publishers on a two year pilot from 2004-06—Bloomsbury, Faber, Harper Collins, Harlequin Mills & Boon, Penguin, Random House and Time Warner. The Public Lending Right is a partner in the initiative.

The consortium wants to develop the audience for reading by cross-fertilizing library and retail markets. It aims to: change the working practices of publishers and libraries; influence the way books are marketed; create a more vibrant library experience for readers and explore changes in publishing to draw new readers into the market.

The workplan for the 2004-06 pilot includes:

— Building new communications paths by creating a partnership coordinator post, a national steering group and a network of 12 UK library representatives.

— Improving information flow from publishers direct to libraries.

— Linking publishers directly to readers through a dedicated network of 48 library linked readers' groups.

— Creating the first national database of library linked readers group.

— Linking bookshop and library promotion to Public Lending Right data.

— Building libraries into publishers' marketing plans to generate more marketing resources.

— Creating an accredited national author touring network.

4. LIBRARIES' WORK WITH YOUNG PEOPLE AS AN EXAMPLE OF HOW USERS CAN BE MUCH MORE INVOLVED WITH SHAPING THE MODERN LIBRARY SERVICE

Part of our recent work for Framework for the Future has been to lead the work on a new strategy for libraries' work with young people aged 11-19 called Fulfilling Their Potential. This has come at a particularly important time, with the forthcoming Youth Green Paper and the DfES 5 year strategy (which is frustratingly short on mentions of libraries).

Fulfilling Their Potential did a thorough research, policy and needs analysis, and consulted with young people. The evidence shows why young people need to be a national priority for libraries and why they deserve equal access to the best libraries can do for them.

It comes to the conclusion that libraries have a distinctive role to play in improving the quality of life of all young people, with a particularly important role in relation to young people at risk. It identifies factors which have inhibited libraries' potential to address issues about young people's life chances but goes on to show how they can deliver on the Government's agenda for improving the areas of young people's lives outlined in Every Child Matters: being healthy, staying safe, enjoying and achieving, making a positive contribution, economic well-being.

Fulfilling Their Potential outlines how libraries' work with young people can play a key role in joined-up local authority work to deliver on the Shared Priorities agreed by national and local government. It highlights the increasingly important participation agenda and challenges libraries to play a much greater role in involving young people in designing policies and services.

Good practice case studies are cited which show that many libraries already offer young people a powerful mix of learning, social and creative experiences. If this can be achieved in some authorities, the ambition of all library services should be to achieve the same.

The report aims to make systemic changes which will radically improve young people's experience of library services. It recommends new directions and defines minimum national offers from libraries to young people. These are challenging, but can be achieved progressively. It encourages libraries to be more responsive to young people's needs in designing services and more dynamic in delivering and marketing them.

A new co-ordinated approach is outlined to developing services within a quality framework which would equalize access and extend libraries' support for 11-19 year olds. The report proposes that a national programme, locally delivered, be developed which would offer young people access, wherever they live, to:

— The library as the space in the community for young people.

— Inspiring, relevant reading including creative reading activities.

— The chance to get involved and shape the library service.

— The library as the place to participate in the wider community and in democracy.

— The library as the independent place for information and study support.

Reading as the basis for participation work with young people at risk

With the National Youth Agency we run a programme called YouthBOOX, which shows how libraries' reading centred work can be a springboard for involving users in shaping services.

YouthBOOX puts participation at the heart of work to create palatable routes back into reading for socially excluded 13-18 year olds—people who don't read either because they can't or because reading resonates painfully of school and failure, or because their homes are book free zones. Given the links between low literacy levels and low achievement, and youth offending, this is important work.

YouthBOOX fuses the skills and resources of youth workers and librarians and works to make reading more enjoyable by starting not with the organizations' priorities, but the young people's. They are involved in making decisions about library stock, layout and in challenging unnecessarily hallowed library systems which we could do with ditching.

The work is about changing the relationship young people have with the public library service through some experimental project work which should be happening everywhere. In the last three years we have worked with young people in 25 local authorities. The joint library/youth service work can be sited anywhere—youth clubs, homeless hostels, first tenancies, pupil referral units . . .

Each project goes through the same learning curve, and we have now confirmed a model that works. At first it all seems quite impossible as library staff struggle with young people's noise levels, swearing, lack of concentration, limited aspirations. Young people don't want to talk about books unless given a lot of space. Then gradually things change—through the relationships built and through starting with young people's interests and life experience. Wherever possible YouthBOOX invites young people to take charge—of buying books for the library and youth club, of design decisions about library layout and publicity. The results show that it is possible through this kind of outreach work to re-engage young people with reading and the library, and that it can have a profound effect on their involvement with the community. We would like to see a YouthBOOX-type co-ordinator in every local authority, feeding into creativity, participation and crime reduction government programmes such as Positive Activities for Young People.

The full Fulfilling Their Potential report and details of YouthBOOX can be found on our website—www.readingagency.org.uk

To conclude

The Reading Agency is excited to be working with public libraries at such a time of potential and change. As Melvyn Bragg says:

November 2004

1 Speech for the National Library for the Blind (<bu222>www.nlb-online.org) Back

2 Audit Commission-Building better library services, 2002. Back

3 Wade & Moore, Bookstart, the first five years, BookTrust 1998. Back

4 Housebound library user-J Toyne & B Usherwood, Checking the Books, the value and impact of public library book reading, University of Sheffield, 2001. Back

5 Survey of Chatterbooks reading group's The Reading Agency 2004. Back

6 Lancashire Libraries' survey of reading group members, 2003. Back

7 For work with adult readers: www.branchingout.org.uk For work with children and young people: www.theirreadingfutures.org.uk Back

8 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, Basic Books 2002. Back