Government commits to ensuring every primary school has a library

The Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves has committed to ensuring every primary school in the country will have a library by the end of this Parliament.

The announcement was made at the Treasury by Reeves and follows several years of campaigning by literacy organisations and publishers to ensure every primary school has a library, something that is not a statutory requirement for schools.

The campaigning has become more urgent with the ongoing and marked decline in children's reading for pleasure which has reached an all-time low, marked in reports from the National Literacy Trust and publishers Harpercollins and Farshore, and the launch of the Reading Rights Report by Booktrust.

The National Literacy Trust co-founded the Libraries for Primaries campaign with Penguin in 2021 who, together with a group of publishing and literacy organisations, particularly Foyles have campaigned to address the chronic lack of investment in UK school libraries.

The NLT has transformed more than 1,000 primary school libraries and trained over 2,000 teachers and support staff as part of the Libraries for Primaries campaign and the next phase of the campaign is to ensure that every primary school in the UK has dedicated library space; something that has achieved a big step forward with the Chancellor's statement which should result in a library in every primary school by 2029.

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