THE TOP TEN!

A couple of weeks ago the TES published the Top 100 Teachers’ Favourite Books and, in response, school librarians created their own list (see blog below). Since then, we’ve taken the top ten and put together a further list with an overall winner! The final list is interesting and, again, shows the diversity of school librarians’ reading with books ranging from both adult and children’s classics through to contemporary novels and, unsurprisingly, including several crossover books. The results were very close but the final list, in order, is:

The Book Thief – Marcus Zusak
His Dark Materials trilogy – Philip Pullman
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Chaos Walking trilogy – Patrick Ness
The Lord of the Rings trilogy – JRR Tolkien
The Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
Noughts and Crosses series – Malorie Blackman
Private Peaceful – Michael Morpurgo
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
Black Beauty – Anna Sewell

I wonder how many teachers have heard of some of these books, let alone read them? And yet I know from my own experience that most school librarians and several of my students will have read the majority of them. With a whole-school approach to literacy being high on the Ofsted agenda, perhaps it’s time for schools and teachers to recognise that their librarians are the experts when it comes to books for children rather than just rely on the English department, and for PGCE courses to include a module on children’s and young adult publishing?