+44 (0) 1273 386849The School Curriculum Is Changing Again. What Does Your School Library Do Now?
A few months ago, we explored the impact of constantly changing education policy on school libraries.
Since then, a new prime minister has set out plans for technical pathways from age 14, and the government has announced further proposals for vocational qualifications. The revised national curriculum is expected in Spring 2027, with first teaching planned for September 2028.
And, as we’ve been looking more closely at curriculum support, one thing has become increasingly clear: it isn’t simply a question of whether you have the right books on the shelves. It is about where the library fits into what pupils are learning, where it can take that learning next, and whether pupils can actually access what you provide.
So, before worrying about what might change, let’s look at the curriculum your school is teaching right now and ask: How well does your library actually support it?
See where the school library fits
When thinking about curriculum support, it is tempting to begin with the school library collection. A better starting point is what your school is actually teaching.
Ask for the curriculum overview or long-term plan your school already uses, then talk to teachers. Where do pupils struggle? Which topics are poorly served by existing resources? Where would they like pupils to read more widely or follow an interest beyond the classroom?
You don’t need to tackle the whole curriculum at once. Choose one subject, year group or even one topic being taught this term and see how well the library supports it.
Or turn the exercise around and start with your own library teaching plan. Look at the research and information skills you already teach — perhaps critical evaluation, misinformation, effective searching or the responsible use of AI — and consider where they connect with learning elsewhere in the school.
It can be an illuminating way to see the library not simply as supporting the curriculum, but as part of it.
What does your library management system tell you?
Your LMS does more than issue books and keep track of several thousand objects that spend an alarming amount of time where they shouldn’t be. It also holds useful evidence about the collection.
Search your chosen curriculum area. What do you have in stock? How old is it? What is being borrowed? What hasn’t moved for years? Where are the obvious gaps?
Treat the numbers as evidence rather than answers. An unborrowed book may be poor, or it may simply be impossible to find. Publication date matters enormously in computing and rather less in poetry and literature. Twenty resources s on a subject may represent excellent coverage – or twenty versions of essentially the same thing.
Which means you need to go and look at the resources. These may be online, or on the physical shelves.
Supporting the school curriculum doesn’t mean duplicating it
This is where things become more interesting, and why most of us got into librarianship in the first place.
Suppose Year 3 are learning about plants in science. The library may have books explaining roots, pollination and seed dispersal, but curriculum support needn’t stop there. A child might encounter biographies of botanists and environmentalists, books about rainforests and food production, nature poetry, stories about gardens and growing, or a field guide that sends them outside to identify what is growing in the school grounds.
(I recently came across a cozy mystery in which identifying the plants in the garden is part of the protagonist’s child’s schoolwork. Curriculum support can turn up in unexpected places!)
At secondary level, take migration, which pupils may encounter through history. Alongside the historical material, the library can offer memoir, biography, fiction, journalism and personal accounts. Those different kinds of reading can take pupils into individual experiences of migration and wider questions about identity, culture and belonging.
The library doesn’t need to recreate the lesson in book form. The classroom may provide the starting point; the library gives pupils somewhere to go next. That is a more useful way to think about curriculum support than trying to fill a shelf for every topic on the curriculum.
The school library is more than curriculum support, it is an entire “support line”
There is another test worth making. At the Libraries Rising conference last year, young people talked about the school libraries that had mattered to them.
They remembered lessons taking place in the library and subjects crossing naturally into library use. They talked about homework, computers and printing, studying with friends and dropping in at lunchtime. For pupils without a quiet place to study or the right equipment at home, that access mattered even more.
One young person described the library as a daytime “support line”. It is a lovely description of something that won’t appear on an official curriculum plan.
So take the topic you’ve chosen and try approaching your library as a pupil. Can they find it using the words they would search for? Is there an accessible place to start? Something for the pupil who wants to go further? Can they follow an interest from one resource into another? And can they actually get into the library when they need it?
A perfectly aligned collection isn’t much use if the pupil who needs it can’t access it.
What could your pupils do, discover or understand because their school library is there?
There will always be changes in education, and it is easy to lose sight of what matters amidst the policies, papers and pronouncements. Schools know some of what is proposed, but the revised curriculum and the local detail are still being worked out.
That starts with knowing what your school is teaching and understanding where the library already fits. Your LMS can show you what you have; your professional judgement tells you whether it is useful. Looking beyond the obvious curriculum resources can reveal opportunities for wider reading and discovery, while looking at the library from a pupil’s point of view tells you whether that support actually works in practice.
Back in our earlier post, we said that staying grounded doesn’t mean standing still. This is what that looks like in practice. You don’t need to predict what happens next. Know your school, know your library, and be ready to bring the two together.
What could your pupils do, discover or understand because their library is there?
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