When Mark Russell first arrived at Kirkland High School and Community College in Methil, the only children who entered his library came and went as flashes of colour. They would run in, steal a book, and leg it. Now times have changed. On Thursday there was a table-full of sixth-year students discussing the authors they are currently reading, from Jane Austen to Martina Cole, Thomas Hardy to Yann Martel.
Kirkland is a low-slung edifice, so ugly that it has a certain brutalist charm, bordered on one side by a green synthetic playing field. It sits at the heart of a village that is all 1960s hutch-housing, with no charm, brutalist or otherwise. Methil is a hard, hard place; Kirkland the sort of school Diane Abbott might represent but would never send her son to.
Russell is a serious and committed man, and he has transformed the school's long, thin library. He says he is lucky with his bosses, one of whom sits in with the reading group. You get the feeling that Kirkland contains some remarkable teaching staff, yet Russell's own commitment to his job is astonishing. He dealt with the kids' lack of interest by starting a chess group, creating a team that Fife can now be proud of. And as the children sat and moved bishop to knight five, he whispered in their ears, asking what their homework was, suggesting books that might help.
At the Bookseller magazine's annual dinner in April, Anthony Forbes Watson, CEO of Penguin, argued that the publishing industry is losing readers by being too obsessed with internal rivalry. 'We are not good at recruiting and keeping new readers and we must get better at growing the book community and generating loyalty to the reading experience,' he told his peers.
Yet there is Russell, walking along to WH Smith and gazing at the vibrant shelves. He says that he feels a terrible envy looking at displays he can only dream of recreating at Kirkland. He knows his grant is generous. He can spend £2,000 a year, but within that he has to buy newspapers and magazines. Add it all up, and I suspect I spend that myself.
Forbes Watson has recognised the problem; he gave a wonderful speech. 'The segment which dropped out of book buying the fastest in the Booktrack data was 15- to 24-year-olds,' he said. Yet that was exactly the group of kids that I met on Thursday. At that age, I recall being drawn into a story, to the point where the world disappeared, a feeling now irrecoverable with age. I mentioned this to the students, and they grew more animated on this subject than any other. This is clearly the age when lifelong readers are born.
There is a debate over the current curriculum. Some say it is too based on chunks of text which the students have to study to death, while nobody instils a love of reading in itself. Some recent research has confirmed the rather obvious point that a lack of reading at an early age leads to a lack of literacy and increased unemployment. A study in Liverpool showed that 30 per cent of children grow up in a house containing six books or less. Perhaps I am being unfair to Methil, but I suspect the figures are not dissimilar.
The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals have also carried out a survey called Start With the Child. They discovered that while children prefer television (surely not?), most have a high opinion of books, the very idea appealing to their nascent sense of individualism. Obviously reading is a good thing, and there have been successes. The Summer Reading Challenge, which garners children a medal if they read six pre-chosen books, hooked in 650,000 kids last summer.
This is heart-warming, of course, burbling as it does to the gentle hubbub of civic life going along, the people who love books and children doing their best with limited resources. Yet it also feels faintly middle class, while Russell funds the publishing industry with a budget equal to what I will spend on myself. Meanwhile, a leader of the industry talks of 'turning round' the national decline in book-buyers by 'revisiting the informal industry convention that it is almost always more cost-effective to spend money marketing to the heavy book-buyer than it is to the non buyer'.
Russell has to pay for all the newspapers he buys bar one. The Daily Telegraph gives school librarians a voucher which allows them a free copy every day. Russell appreciates it but points out that of all the newspapers he could receive in Methil, the Telegraph is perhaps the one that chimes least with his students. It does show forward thinking from Conrad Black though, and perhaps other publishers should be thinking the same thing.
In all these schools are the readers of the future, if only Russell and his ilk can get them to pick up the books before it is too late. Publishers fight to make bookshops look like sweet shops; perhaps if they took a similar interest in school libraries they would secure audiences for generations to come. I would love Mr Forbes Watson to get in touch with Mr Russell, for if the parents aren't there to do it, no one will create readers as fast as that man in Methil and the people like him in the towns and cities of our land.
