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Their Reading Futures: how it’s working – with a real-life example from Hertfordshire

Tricia Kings Last year we had the Their Reading Futures (TRF) roadshow. Up and down the country, at 14 venues, heads of children’s library services and YLG ‘champions’ from every library authority got together to find out ‘Why Their Reading Futures?’ – ‘What’s it all about?’

Lots of the energy and ideas from those sessions have now fed into the making of the website for Their Reading Futures www.theirreadingfutures.org.uk, which was launched at the end of September 2003 – so what’s been happening with TRF since then?

What is TRF doing now? – and, most importantly, what are you doing with TRF?

As you know, Their Reading Futures is a long term programme to support and enhance libraries’ reader development work with children and young people. (See YLR Spring Issue 2002 for a full description)

As you appreciated at last year’s roadshow sessions, hardly any of the content is new – in fact most of it is what libraries working with children have been doing powerfully and effectively for so many years. Powerfully and effectively for the children – but not always effectively enough to be appreciated, acknowledged, adequately resourced or maintained as a key strategic element in library services.

What’s new in TRF is the shaping and packaging of this powerful activity into powerful tools which will win recognition and support, and ensure the strategic placing, continuation and development of this important work which libraries do with children.

TRF gives you

Planning tools: helping particularly with Outcomes based planning which focuses on the people for whom we’re working to make a difference. This is especially important in the light of the Audit Commission’s emphasis on outcomes, and Resource’s framework ‘Inspiring Learning for All.’
Evaluation tools
Advocacy tools
Training tools
What’s in the programme and on the website so far is a beginning. TRF is being put together by the profession for the profession – it’s organic, it’s growing. Over the past year library authorities have started to use the TRF tools (see June TRF newsletter) and benefit from them. As they’ve used them they’ve had more ideas about what would be useful, or what would work better, and these ideas are going into the next big stage of TRF.
From September 2003 to March 2004 DCMS/Resource is funding Their Reading Futures as part of the ‘Workforce Development’ programme in the action plan for ‘Framework for the Future’. This funding is going to be used for
TRF Training: working with the new MLACs and with library authorities who are running with TRF, providing practical examples of how TRF can work (as in the Hertfordshire case study below), and practical packages you can take away and use to meet your local needs for planning, evaluation, training and advocacy
Developing the TRF Website: lots of ideas and feedback are being pulled together here to build the website further and to change and improve it. The narrative and navigation will be simplified; the home page will carry headlines and updates about the site and how people are using it; there will be packages for people with different needs and different amounts of time available to spend at the computer (‘How to get the most out of this website in 30 minutes’!); and there will be templates and case studies about how TRF is actually being used

As described above, TRF is being developed by the profession, for the profession – so please do look at the website and find out more about it. Send in and say what you think – what you like, what you don’t like, what should be there, what works, what doesn’t, what you’ve been doing, what you’re planning to do.

Send to: info@readingagency.org.uk … and now, here’s one way which TRF is working in Hertfordshire! “Their Reading Futures” Hertfordshire Training Day

On 7 April 2003 Hertfordshire held a training day for all 15 Young People’s Services Librarians and 3 representatives from adult reader development.

The aim of the day was to introduce everybody to the “Their Reading Futures” project and to the materials available on the website. Our plan was to make the day as practical as possible with plenty of time for group discussion.

After several planning sessions we opted to concentrate on two main aspects of reader development, namely planning for successful outcomes and advocacy work. We chose outcomes because we wanted librarians to focus on the end result of reader development in order to enhance the success of various established projects and future initiatives. We particularly chose advocacy because it is now part of the YP Librarians’ role to represent the library service at Early Years and Childcare Partnerships in their districts. We wanted to introduce some advocacy tools that would help them to promote the service at these important interagency meetings.

One of the TRF Steering Group, David Streatfield (Information Management Associates), ran the morning session on outcomes, getting us to agree key objectives for various projects and to identify measurable success criteria. We suggested the projects for this session and based them on existing initiatives (Summer Reading Challenge, Class Visits and Reading Groups), as we wanted everybody to have background knowledge to the projects under discussion.

We based the advocacy session around four scenarios that we had scripted in advance. After a short presentation, the groups were all given the same scenario based on a situation that commonly arises at Early Years and Childcare Partnership meetings. They were asked to come up with suggestions for a response containing positive messages. Each group then repeated this exercise with one other scenario based on one of the themes that were used in the morning session. We tried to ensure that the scenarios involved responding to a variety of people (a parent, a teacher and other library staff) and also that the situations were realistic!

These are the case scenarios which were used for this training:

A Your nearest school tells you that they can no longer visit the library as there isn’t enough time in the school day to meet the requirements of the literacy strategy. How do you persuade them that libraries have a role in supporting their work?

B You are the public library representative at a parents’ evening in a primary school. You have a display which includes summer reading materials. A parent says to you, “He does reading in school – I like to give him a rest from it during the holidays”. How do you convince them of the benefits of the summer reading challenge?

C You have identified a library in your district where you would like to set up children’s reading group. You sense there is some staff resistance to this. How do you convince the staff of its importance?

D You are attending your first meeting of your district’s Early Years Development and Childcare Partnership. In the tea break, a nursery headteacher says, “You said you were from the libraries, didn’t you? Why are libraries involved in the partnership?” What do you say?)
We ended the day with a brief look at the TRF website using a live link to the Internet. This was designed to give everybody the confidence to explore for themselves the resources that are contained on the website in order to build on the work that had been done during the training day. This gave us an opportunity to highlight areas on the website such as the Core Skills pages that we did not have time to cover in great detail during the programme for the day.

It was a timely training session for us as we have just recruited several newly qualified YP Librarians and our more experienced staff are also launching various new projects in their districts. We see this very much as a starting point for our use of the TRF project in Hertfordshire. All the group work was captured on flip charts throughout each session and this information has been collated and distributed to everybody that attended along with a reminder to check the TRF website for more resources. We intend to continue to build TRF into relevant training in the future.

Michele Murphy
Young People’s Services Development Librarian, Hertfordshire