Every year I write a short report on our school library for the head teacher. This year I looked back over ten years of borrowing figures, and they told a story I want to share.
In 2015 our pupils borrowed 4,200 books. Over the next four years the number fell steadily, and by 2019 it had dropped to 2,600 — a decline of about 38 per cent. Nobody was surprised. Phones had arrived in every pocket, and we all assumed the downward trend would continue.
Then 2020 came. The school was closed for months, and borrowing plunged to just 900. In 2021 it recovered slightly, to 1,400, but the line on my graph still pointed firmly down.
In September 2022 we tried one cheap experiment. We did not buy new books; we had no money for that. Instead, we took the two shelves nearest the entrance and turned every book on them face out, so that pupils saw the covers instead of the spines. Every Monday a different class chose which books went on those shelves, and wrote a one-line review on a card for each.
The results were remarkable. Borrowing for 2022 rose to 2,800. In 2023 it rose sharply, by 64 per cent, to 4,600 — more than in any year since we began keeping records. It peaked at 5,100 in 2024 and levelled off at around 5,000 last year.
Two details in the figures matter more than the totals. First, nearly half of all the books borrowed since 2022 came from the two face-out shelves, which hold fewer than one per cent of our collection. Second, the books that pupils borrowed most were not new. Many of them had stood on our shelves, spine out and untouched, for more than a decade.
I do not want to claim more than the numbers show. One school is not a country, and phones have not gone away. But the graph makes one point very clearly. For years we believed that our pupils had stopped wanting to read. The figures suggest something humbler: they had simply stopped being able to see the books.