BER waste as schools scrap books

SCHOOLS are getting rid of printed books, despite $4bn of taxpayers' money being spent on 3472 libraries in the past three years.

Henley High school, Virtual library

CYBER-SMART schools are getting rid of printed books, despite $4 billion of taxpayers' money spent building 3472 libraries in the past three years.

Adelaide's beachside Henley High School has donated its 10,000 printed library books to charity. The empty bookshelves will soon be sold, as they are redundant in the "virtual library".

And on the Gold Coast, Varsity College is phasing out its printed book collection -- despite a $3 million federal grant to build a new library, which will now be reconfigured as a "digital resource centre".

Henley High's 1200 students all have laptops, and either use the internet for research or borrow one of the 16,000 "e-books" downloaded from their new digital library. Principal Liz Schneyder yesterday said students had stopped borrowing the library's printed books a few years ago.

"I was really concerned; I thought that was saying something about our literacy, yet our NAPLAN (national literacy and numeracy testing) results were very good." Ms Schneyder said.

"We found that students were accessing books on their phones.

"In the end it became inevitable. If you look at all the Gen Y kids, why would they look at a picture of the Louvre if they can take a 360-degree tour?

"Our atlas still had (the Soviet Union) in it because it was so old, but now they can go online and Google someone's house."

In a letter to parents to explain the decision to phase out printed books, Jeff Davis, executive principal of Varsity College, wrote: "The current rate of book borrowing is at an all-time low.

"The current fiction collection will be reviewed and books identified as not being borrowed for some time will be removed to minimise this to a range of books that reflect the borrowing trends of students and staff. In consultation with the librarian, teachers and heads of departments will review the non-fiction collection and identify materials that are out of date.

"The remaining books will be allocated to classrooms where they will be available for all students to use as required."

Mr Davis said the library would be reconfigured to accommodate student laptops, with WiFi internet access and IT support desks.

The library budget will be spent on e-fiction and subscriptions to online databases for research.

The demise of the printed book collections at Henley High and Varsity College comes as new data obtained by The Australian shows that, in the National Year of Reading, hundreds of primary school libraries constructed with federal Building the Education Revolution grants still do not have a librarian.

A federal parliamentary inquiry was told last year that one in three government school libraries did not have a librarian, as the trend towards self-managed schools allows principals to hire full-time classroom teachers instead. New data reveals that one in five of the 179 new BER libraries built in Western Australia does not have a librarian. In the Northern Territory, nine of the 35 schools given BER libraries have "no one staffing the library", according to NT Education Department data.

Queensland employs 933 full-time-equivalent teacher-librarians in its 1230 state schools -- leaving at least one in four schools without a librarian.

Federal School Education Minister Peter Garrett yesterday defended the BER spending on new libraries, but said staffing them was a matter for the states.

Georgia Phillips, who founded library lobby group The Hub, insists librarians are essential to "help kids and teachers find quality information and evaluate it critically".

"Do we want kids to just copy and paste from Google?" she said.

Australian School Library Association executive officer Karen Bonanno said children still liked to read books in the library -- even if they did not always take them home. "The students don't want to lug stuff around any more," Ms Bonanno said.

"But just because books are not borrowed doesn't mean the material is not valuable."