‘So what made you decide to become a school librarian?’ Reasons people currently working in New Zealand school libraries give for their choice of employment

Background and purpose of the study

School librarianship is a ‘greying’ profession, so new entrants to school library work must be found (Edge and Green, 2011; Jones, 2010: 167). The library profession, library educators, and employers cannot assist with recruitment efforts unless they understand what motivates individuals to choose school librarianship as a career, and then what keeps them in it. Additionally, if employers understand the de-motivating factors that discourage people from entering school librarianship or staying in it, problems could be rectified.

An inevitable factor in school librarianship as a career in New Zealand is that, as in many countries, school librarianship is an almost exclusively female sector, and many come to it either from other sectors of librarianship, from teaching, or by ‘accidentally’ happening upon librarianship, as a second or third career (Bosseau and Martin, 1995: 198).

Theoretical framework

The research was concerned with motivations: the motivation to become a school librarian and to stay in the job, and the disincentives to enter the career. The theoretical framework is Herzberg’s motivation theory in the world of work, which identified six principal motivators (the presence of which can result in job satisfaction), and the 10 ‘hygiene’ or ‘maintenance’ factors (the absence of which can result in job dissatisfaction). This theory suggests that individuals are not content with the satisfaction of lower-order needs, rather they desire the gratification of higher-level psychological needs. Herzberg’s theory has been used to study job satisfaction amongst librarians on many occasions, a recent example being Alansari’s (2011) study of Kuwaiti librarians. Job satisfaction and dissatisfaction can exist at the same time as positives and negatives of varying strengths. For reference the six ‘motivators’ are:

and the 10 ‘hygiene’ or ‘maintenance factors’ are:

Added to Herzberg’s ‘motivators’, and ‘hygiene’ or ‘maintenance’ factors were additional questions related to recruitment and retention in school librarianship.

The research was inspired by feminist theory. Librarianship has the problem that the pay, status, and career opportunities are generally lower for both men and women than they are in occupations requiring similar levels of education but not considered as women’s work (Hildenbrand, 1989: 153). This research asks why well-qualified women continue to self-select into poorly paid roles.

School librarianship in New Zealand

All New Zealand’s state schools have a Board of Trustees. The board is the Crown entity responsible for the governance and the overall management of the school. It is the employer of all staff in the school, including those who work in the library. Boards set the strategic direction for the school and, being responsible for budgetary oversight, have considerable influence on the allocation of resources. The board is elected by the parent community, staff members and, in the case of schools with students above Year 9, the students (New Zealand School Trustees Association, 2014).

The significance of this is that each school can choose whether or not to employ staff for the library and whether or not they will expect library staff to be qualified. There is no legislative requirement for a school even to have a library, though the great majority do. Job titles are at the discretion of each school, too. This means that the term ‘school librarian’ can only be used broadly to describe staff who do the day-to-day operations in a school library, though it is not used for casual staff. The term ‘library technician’ is not used in New Zealand.

Those working in school libraries have qualifications that range from a Master of Information Studies to nothing, with graduate and non-graduate qualifications in between. There are no specific programmes in school librarianship offered in New Zealand, so those with qualifications will have completed a ‘general’ programme in librarianship and/or information studies. There are still some school staff with teacher librarianship qualifications but this programme is no longer available.

Organisational structures vary between schools and the school librarian may be responsible to a teacher with library responsibility, who reports to the Principal, though in some cases the school librarian reports to a Deputy Principal; there is simply no typical structure. The hierarchical nature of education and schools means that the teaching profession is in charge of telling the librarianship profession what to do and how to do it. Library staff are often called ‘support’ staff to separate them from the teachers who have a higher status.

No salary data has been collected since 2009 when an average full-time equivalent salary for a school librarian was about NZ$35,000 (Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa, 2009). School librarianship is almost equivalent to public librarianship in terms of salary. Most school librarians work part time, and term time only, with statutory holidays and four weeks’ paid annual leave, so there are five to seven weeks per year that are unpaid.

Research questions

The focus of this study was:

The answers to these questions will help to attract and retain good staff of the kind we want to be 21st century school librarians.

Review of the literature

Two studies stand out as having particular relevance to this research project. The first is Shannon (2008) on career choice and recruitment in school librarianship.

She surveyed 275 University of South Carolina School of Library and Information Science school media certification programme completers, and then conducted focus group interviews with ‘fourteen women representing a mix of current students and program completers, who did not have classroom teaching experience’ (Shannon, 2008: 217).

The focus group interviews were held to understand more about how non-teachers discovered school librarianship and what attracted them to it as a possible career. Shannon clustered her results from the interviews around three themes; ‘the personal’, ‘the practical’ and ‘the passion’.

A ‘personal’ contact, most often a librarian, was how most participants became aware of school librarianship as a possible career (Shannon, 2008: 218).

The ‘practical’ was a major consideration. Women with families valued having the same schedule as school age children. Those married to teachers could share the same vacations.

Finally, ‘the passion’ covers reasons associated with choosing a personally rewarding and satisfying career; the results ‘found the variety of the job and the opportunity to work with both children and adults as positive aspects of the profession’ (Shannon, 2008: 226).

In summary ‘most of the non-teachers were women looking for second careers and interested in a work schedule that matches that of family members’ (Shannon, 2008: 223).

The second relevant study is that of Jones (2010) on the occupational choice of school librarians. In this qualitative study Jones used Savickas’ (2005) career construction theory as a framework for analysing the data from her life story interviews. She discusses how various influences over a ‘life course’ shaped the vocational personalities of the participants and lead them to be attracted to school librarianship.

Jones (2010: 174) identified themes in her data that can now be seen as common to her study, to Shannon’s (2008), and to this one. Those that were relevant to this study were: ‘career changers, librarian mentors, prior library work experiences, reading, library experiences, altruism-service, desire to work with children, flexibility of work schedule, emotional distance, and the “vocational personality” of the participants’ (Jones, 2010: 174).

Much of the remaining literature relevant to this project touches on aspects of school librarianship, ranging across the personality traits of individuals in different specialities of librarianship (Williamson et al., 2008); job satisfaction (Houdyshell et al., 1999; Kenney, 2009); the importance of the relationship with the school principal (Farmer, 2007; Shannon, 2009); school library leadership (Coatney, 2010); career choice; how to go about becoming a school librarian; and finally, issues of recruitment and retention in the library profession generally (Bishop and Janczak, 2007; Bosseau and Martin, 1995; Morgan et al., 2009).

Librarians generally experience a very high level of job satisfaction. The School Library Journal Job Satisfaction Survey 2008 ‘shows that most librarians are crazy about their jobs’ (Kenney, 2009: 28). The ‘satisfaction top five’ in school librarianship were:

Morgan et al. examined data from 1903 working library and information science graduate respondents of LIS programmes in North Carolina. They concluded that women are more likely than men to be influenced by intrinsic rewards (e.g. ‘working with people’) and ‘to prefer intrinsic qualities in a job’ (e.g. ‘feeling of doing something meaningful’, ‘occupation in which one can help others’) (Morgan et al., 2009: 212). Their findings show that women place a high importance on the need for work-family balance and flexibility in employment.

One of the major attractions of school librarianship is that it offers many opportunities for just such family-friendly employment options. In New Zealand many school librarians are able to job share and/or work part time. These advantages come at a price, however. Part-timers are often considered (erroneously) to be less committed to their work than full-timers and to have no interest in promotion. Curiously, in the field of education these judgements are often being made in the school hierarchy by women of other women. Nonetheless, women continue to self-select into worthwhile but poorly paid occupations such as school librarianship.

Relevant to this, Taylor et al.’s (2010) study of library school students found that the majority were more concerned with the specific functions of librarianship than with prestige, compensation, or other benefits that might influence a decision to pursue a more high-profile career (Taylor et al., 2010: 41).

In conclusion, most school librarians find their work extremely rewarding most of the time, and ‘would recommend it enthusiastically or with some reservations’ (Kenney, 2009: 31). School librarianship appeals to ‘mid-life career switchers’ (Kenney, 2009: 31) and to those librarians for whom child or elder care is a priority for a period in their lives, a point endorsed by Jones (2010: 175). The family-friendly opportunities to work part time and the convenience of working within school terms make for a good work/life balance for working mothers.

Factors which have not been discussed in depth in the literature with relation to school librarianship are two of Herzberg’s motivators: recognition for achievement, and advancement. Advancement is apparently more important to men and the ability to balance work with family is more important to women. Intrinsic rewards, altruism, and ‘making a difference’, are more important to, and more often associated with, women. However, the lack of opportunity for advancement in school librarianship and the frustrating lack of recognition for achievement are two dissatisfactions fitting within Herzberg’s six first-level motivating factors.

Research design

The immediate personal experience of working in a school library was central to the research hence qualitative, semi-structured, in-depth interviews were used because the project was seeking ‘qualitative, descriptive, in-depth data that is specific to the individual’ (Pickard, 2013: 196).

A purposive sample was used, limited to Wellington-based secondary school librarians. Key informants were selected through professional associations, and an attempt was made to select a variety of associated schools: single-sex and mixed, high and low decile, private and state schools. The sample for the interviews came to nine participants.

It is accepted as a limitation of this study that it was restricted to a small number of secondary school librarians in Wellington, New Zealand. All participants were white, female, and over the age of 40, yet this is representative of the majority of school librarians in the region. It is acknowledged that there are some school librarians in Wellington who are not of European ethnicity, and some who are male, and that including these librarians could have provided different perspectives. It was decided to keep to a homogenous group to maintain some consistency in the results and increase the likelihood that the conclusions of the study would illustrate the experiences of the majority. No one who had left school librarianship was interviewed. Exploring the reasons why people leave this field should be the focus for another study.

Ethics approval had been granted by Victoria University of Wellington and participants assured of confidentiality. The interviews took place at each participant’s place of work, within their working day, in a private area of the library. Digital recordings and detailed notes were taken during the interviews. All nine interviews were transcribed in full.

Corbin and Strauss’ (2008) advice was taken and all the transcripts were reviewed again, dividing the data into chunks while writing reflective, ‘sense-making’ memos about each section. At the end of this exercise themes were definitely emerging from the data, but more needed to be done, so the interview questions were first roughly grouped according to attractions, influence(r)s, and satisfactions, then second by Herzberg’s ‘motivators’ and ‘hygiene’ factors, and issues for recruitment and retention were coded using themes derived from the data, or from the literature review.

Findings

The first findings are on the initial focus of the research project; “what factors attracted people to school librarianship?” These are followed by the findings related to “What were the most important influences on a decision to become a school librarian?” Finally the last research question “What has kept people working in school librarianship?” is addressed, describing among other things satisfaction in the role of school librarian.

Retention: What factors have kept you working in this field?

The 24 individual ‘satisfactions’ found for school librarianship were then compared with Kenney (2009) and with Herzberg’s ‘motivators’ and ‘hygiene / maintenance’ factors. This is revealing, for it shows where the attractions of school librarianship lie.

The top ‘satisfactions’ from the participants were;

It can be seen how closely these match the ‘satisfaction top five’ from Kenney’s research (2009: 28), in which ‘working with young people’ was the top of the list

In answer to the questions ‘what are your principal motivators?’ and, ‘what motivates and encourages you to stay in school librarianship?’ using the framework of Herzberg’s six motivators, the participants unanimously stated, the work itself, then the possibility of growth, followed by responsibility and achievement. Advancement was not a motivator and recognition for achievement was noted as ‘nice when you got it’ but not a major motivator. So it appears that four out of the six of Herzberg’s motivating factors are found very strongly in school librarianship.

Also, and perhaps this is something unique to school librarianship, two of Herzberg’s hygiene/maintenance factors are very strong ‘positives’ of the profession. These factors include ‘interpersonal relations with peers, subordinates and superiors’ and ‘personal life’ and generally they can become major sources of job dissatisfaction. Perhaps unusually in the world of work, the ‘interpersonal relations’; the ‘people’, the ‘students’, the ‘teachers’, ‘colleagues’, and all the staff collaboration and interaction, which can often be a source of stress, irritation, and frustration in other jobs, is a major plus in school librarianship. These interactions are overwhelmingly positive and enjoyable experiences in school librarianship, a huge source of satisfaction to the participants.

Obviously there are occasions when students, teachers, and support staff can be annoying, when

boys are super-gluing computers to desks.

there is a complete and utter lack of support from the computer people.

But on the whole these highly satisfactory relationships with students, teachers, and colleagues are what get school librarians bouncing out of bed in the morning. As one participant expressed it:

it’s definitely the most satisfying job I’ve ever had … I always look forward to coming to work. You never know when you work with adolescents. You never know what madness is going to attack any of them on any particular day. Working with teenagers I find fascinating.

The other hygiene factor mentioned was ‘personal life’. Having the option of flexible work arrangements such as sometimes working for as little as eight hours a week, and getting the school holidays off, is a major bonus in school librarianship, especially for those who need or want extra personal time. There are dissatisfactions associated with not being paid for all of the school holidays throughout the year, but having the school holidays appearing regularly every 10 weeks, and most of the summer off work, is a huge attraction for most.

This participant describes the holidays:

It’s a velvet noose around your neck because it keeps you there. It’s such a bonus because I like having my two weeks off every whatever. There aren’t many jobs where you can get that – I don’t know if I could go back to full time hours with just four weeks’ leave a year.

And another librarian evocatively describes the variety in the year as one of the attractive factors of school life:

I love the rhythms of the year. I reckon I should have been a farmer if I weren’t in a school. I really like the rhythms.

Of the other hygiene and maintenance factors (except for salary and status, to be discussed shortly), the same librarian said:

Supervision, working conditions, job security, personal life; I have no problems with at all.

A number of participants expressed their admiration for teachers’ commitment and passion, and named that as a factor which has kept them working in school librarianship. This comment is from an experienced librarian.

I really enjoy the absolute energy that teachers have, and their commitment and passion … I don’t see myself leaving this job … and it’s because of individual teachers and working with them and their acceptance and trying to make a difference.

Interestingly, the next participant mentioned the ‘emotional distance’ which we can have, that Jones (2010) discussed.

Because I’ve been a teacher and I’ve been observing teachers for years, I don’t think a school librarian should ever be paid what teachers are paid because I don’t see that we have the responsibilities that a teacher has. We don’t have to manage students in a way that a teacher does; we don’t have to work when we walk out the gate, you don’t have to do anything more; you may, but you don’t have to. But you see teachers especially at this time of the year, and they’re exhausted, and I’m not exhausted. It’s huge, and there’s that emotional involvement, mentally draining, and we can tuck ourselves away in an office every now and then and take a breather. They can’t.

Besides the satisfactions of the work itself, a number of participants with qualifications and years of experience in librarianship before coming to school libraries, have been motivated to stay through successful achievements resulting from their own initiatives. Two participants demonstrated the efficacy of report writing to their Principals on important matters.

One of these librarians, who began school library work part time in a job-share arrangement, became very dissatisfied with this, so she conferred with her job-share colleague and decided to write to the Principal.

We sent the report and restructured the job with clear responsibilities for each of us; and she (the Principal) wanted me as the ‘lead’. She said she only wanted to talk to one of us, and she put us on teacher salaries, except that we were to be paid for 80% of the year. But we could follow the steps in the teacher grades, and she gave me two management units, as she wanted me to also be the Manager of the Archive, a new position, 10 hours a week. So, with a decent salary, more hours, a very pleasing job, I was happy! New challenges that I’ve set for myself, and I feel, ‘oh I can’t leave until I’ve got this sorted out. I want to do this and I want to do that’.

This sort of success feeds into itself as both an achievement, and recognition for achievement, which is very satisfying.

Another librarian, fairly new to school librarianship, was given a mandate and the resources to make radical changes to the library. She has found carrying out that challenge exciting and very satisfying, and she feels that:

there’s achievement here and recognition, that’s for sure.

It’s a motivator to stay in school librarianship:

because it does give you a sense of satisfaction when things work out well and you can see that you’ve had an impact on an individual or on a class.

The librarian at the boys’ high school also believes that achievement is quite important as a motivator.

Recognition for achievement, yes and no. I myself know what I’ve achieved since I’ve been here and I do get recognition from staff and other librarians too. They say things to me and that’s nice, but I know that since I’ve started here, the library was a sort of ‘portal pod’ somewhere in the school, and now it’s not. It’s part of the school. You know, the promotion that I’ve achieved since I’ve been here has made it a ‘hub’ of the school now, which is really good. Sometimes it’s not used as much as it should be, but you know, it’s always a work in progress.

As this librarian says, the job is all about customer service, and helping people definitely gives librarians great satisfaction.

And a satisfaction mentioned by all the participants in different ways is the enjoyment of working with young people. The librarian who has spent most of the last 20 years working with Maori and Pasifika students said:

You make a difference if boys who’ve always said they hate reading, you hand them a book and they actually enjoy it and come back for more. That makes a difference.

Another librarian of approximately 20 years’ standing said:

[One] thing that I really enjoy seeing is when the little year 9s come in and they’re so nervous and new, and the library’s a great place for them to come, and just to see them develop from that year 9 to these gorgeous women in year 13. To see that transformation in them, it’s like a privilege really.

The joys of collection building are mentioned by this boys’ school librarian, tied in with the satisfaction of making successful choices.

What I like about this job is you get to do everything and as far as I’m concerned one of the best parts of being a librarian is buying the books!

Two of Herzberg’s motivators that link in with the use of technology in the library are the ‘possibility of growth’ and ‘achievement’. One co-ed librarian said she ‘enjoyed the IT side of the library’, and one of the girls’ school librarians really enjoyed the intellectual challenge of developing library pages on Moodle. It has been pointed out by Bogel (2011) that none of Jones’ respondents (2010) mentioned an interest in technology, so this finding may help balance that.

To summarise the many satisfactions discussed above in school librarianship: all the participants felt they enjoyed a good work/life balance; the work environment suited them and they felt their values matched the values of where they worked; the ‘work itself’ was very satisfying, and on the whole, they enjoyed sufficient responsibility, possibility of growth, and achievement in their roles. Some were luckier than others with recognition for achievement. The positives of school librarianship, at least for the nine school librarians interviewed, outweighed the negatives for recruitment and retention.

Discussion of the ‘hygiene’ or ‘maintenance’ factors

The top three areas of dissatisfaction are salary, status, and working conditions. The boys’ high school librarian said that low salaries were definitely a problem for recruitment.

Even when I came here I halved my hourly rate [compared] to what I was getting. And the value that a librarian offers within a school, it’s hard to quantify it, but you get a good librarian and they’re worth their weight in gold. And quite frankly I think they should be compensated for that.

Generally, school librarians’ wages trail behind the rest of the profession. One of the participants working at a private girls’ school had very perceptive comments to make about this situation in New Zealand schools.

I do think librarians are quite a passive group. And it suits a lot of people to work in a school library. So the employer gets away with a lot because of that; they are very prepared to take on non-qualified people, particularly in the primary schools, and then they pay them a teacher’s aide salary. It’s sort of a vicious cycle really. I don’t know how you raise the status of the profession!

One participant made the point that the salary is not everything:

Salary is fine. I have had much bigger salaries, but the stress associated with them is not worth it.

And one librarian said with regard to pay compared to the rest of the library profession:

well, I know we’re bottom of the pile. The main problem is we’re paid from the school’s operational grant. And if you have a very pro-library exec as ‘School X’ has, then you’ll get your contracts which raise the bar, and if you get one where the library is just part of the scenery then you’ll get paid accordingly, on top of the Associate C scale. But then after the top of that what can you do?

In state schools the money to pay school librarians comes from the Operations Grant, which is under the control of the Board of Trustees, and which also pays for sundry expenses such as photocopiers. If this was re-structured so that qualified school librarians were treated as professionals and paid from the same source as teachers, things could improve.

Well-qualified school librarians resent being considered as support staff, partly because this can have ramifications for how they are regarded by the teaching staff.

We’re labelled ‘Support Staff’. I find that really weird, in ‘no man’s land’, or something. Sometimes I’m lumped with the teachers and sometimes I’m not. And I do find that a negative factor.

The teacher who became a school librarian over a decade ago, expresses it very well. As she says, it would be nice always to be seen as a ‘co-professional with a defined role’.

Another dissatisfaction is that issue of being a ‘support staff’ or a ‘co-professional?’ I understand the role as being in support of what’s going on in classrooms, but it’s not that passive! It can be that passive, but it would be nice to be seen as a co-professional with a defined role, that is as much for student life and learning as a teacher’s role.

One librarian said that as far as status was concerned, although her school was probably better than a lot of schools in the way it acted towards its Support Staff, you were still mostly aware that you were Support Staff in the hierarchy below the teachers.

It’s like X who works for us part time in the afternoons. He was Dux (top scholar) at our school and he was offered two jobs in different departments and he said, no, he wanted to work in the library in the afternoons. So he works for peanuts here, and he said it was really obvious to him, the difference between when he was a student teacher … he was being treated as a potential teacher, and when he became a Support Staff. He said it was very obvious the difference in how people behaved towards him. They still think he’s clever, but he’s ‘only a Support Staff’. I’m used to working in libraries where there are lots of other professional librarians and so you accept your status as a professional librarian amongst that.

Another issue is the role of the teacher with library responsibility (TLR). This role, once common in New Zealand, was created because school library staff were often unqualified but now it has become an anachronism in the schools with qualified library staff. Many schools now have reporting lines direct from the Library Manager to the Deputy Principal, or Principal, which is a far better situation for the status of the library. The librarian who is new to school librarianship reports to her Deputy Principal, but she said the whole TLR concept would be very demotivating for a qualified, experienced librarian.

This next comment mixes two factors, working conditions and ‘company policy and administration’. The boys’ high school librarian who came to school librarianship from the world of finance and accounts, said:

The wheels turn slowly in a school. In the private sector, you want something, you got it; you don’t get that here. It just takes forever to achieve things sometimes. And I find that very frustrating.

Most people come to school librarianship with their eyes wide open and women are still choosing these roles because it suits their lifestyles. The ‘hygiene/maintenance’ factors are not huge sources of dissatisfaction, at least for those in the job; they are only annoyances from time to time.

Recruitment: Inhibitors to recruitment

One of the ‘problems’ for school librarianship is its low profile within the library profession. As one participant said, it is not promoted as worthy and as professional as Web development, for example. Another school librarian named the low profile of school librarianship as a definite inhibitor to recruitment.

And that’s more a prejudice than in any way reflecting what you do.

To combat the low profile (a point raised by McInroy, 1990), school librarianship needs to be promoted more as a career option. This idea was expressed by the school librarian who found her dream job in a late career change:

I wish I’d found it, or thought of it before, but I never did. It never occurred to me. It’s my one big regret … that being a librarian never even entered my mind.

This is a perfect example of librarianship as an ‘accidental profession … populated overwhelmingly by people who discovered it while detouring from some other planned career’ (Bosseau and Martin, 1995: 198).

One of the biggest problems for recruitment to school librarianship is that, as McInroy (1990: 23) points out, it can be seen as a career ‘cul-de-sac’. Yet advancement was definitely not a motivator for the participants. Comments from participants ranged along the lines of:

there is a lack of career advancement in school librarianship. You can’t go anywhere but up your salary scale, unless you are the assistant librarian.

I do think school libraries are seen as some sort of ‘ghetto’. Because the pay is low and a lot of school librarians don’t have library qualifications.

Because there is no prime motivator to switch schools, there is very little staff movement in school libraries, particularly after attaining Head of Department status as Library Manager.

Recruitment: Recommendations and discussion

Most participants agreed on the need to push the Ministry of Education for qualified librarians in school libraries, ‘otherwise we’re never going to raise the status of school librarianship, are we?’

At the moment school librarianship is a lifestyle choice rather than a salary/status choice, and to get that status there has to be more of an emphasis on getting qualified librarians to run libraries and:

that has to come from the Education Department. There has to be leadership to specify that this is what is necessary and ‘they’ve’ got to encourage Boards of Trustees to recognise that this is really important.

One participant tempered this view by saying that qualifications do not necessarily make the person right for the job, and that people skills were just as important.

Another key suggestion from the state girls’ school librarian is the:

education of Principals – to know what they’re wanting. And that would very much depend on their experience with the last school librarian they had. So it’s up to us to promote ourselves too. It comes down to us making a difference while we’re here, so that they don’t settle for less. And I think writing; I think reporting to your Principal about issues that do cause you problems, like when I wrote my report on ICT. I related it to the annual plan, the strategic plan, and our goals.

To ensure the Principal understands the professional nature of the role requires setting a standard in the school. As stated by one participant:

be a role model. Other people can then advocate on your behalf, for example, senior management can say, ‘but in our school we have x and it’s working’.

As mentioned earlier there is a lot to learn that is unique to school librarianship, and having mentors available to lend an ear when a new school librarian is feeling overwhelmed or isolated might help prevent someone good from giving up and wanting to leave.

As suggested by Bishop and Janczak (2007), publicising and explaining the role so people understand the usefulness and purpose in assisting literacy and learning in schools, is useful for recruitment purposes. As one participant said:

Even my brother asked me the other day, ‘What do you actually do? You issue books?’

So to effect change, school librarians need to communicate to multiple audiences what it is they do that makes a difference in schools. Writing articles on school librarianship for academic journals of the wider library profession, and delivering papers on school librarianship at conferences, would help raise the profile of school librarianship.

School librarianship need not be a feminised occupation. Many school teachers and young men and women are attracted to school librarianship and would choose to enter it and stay in the profession, if the issue of poor pay could be addressed. As one of the participants said:

I guarantee there are not a lot of school librarians who live off just their earnings. There are some, and I don’t know how they survive. Most men would look at that and go, ‘yeah right. What if I have kids and my partner is at home breastfeeding for months, I can’t survive on that.’ There are a few male school librarians and it is lovely when we hear about them, but they don’t generally stay in it for too long because they can’t afford it.

Conclusion

School librarianship appeals to many women as a lifestyle choice of profession in which they can enjoy flexibility in working hours and the school holidays off. Encouragingly, however, there are more and more exceptions to this rule and as better qualified librarians enter the profession they might ‘push harder’ for more appropriate conditions: to be paid for 52 weeks of the year, and paid for anything from six to nine weeks’ holiday per year. This profession is unlikely to attract many young men or women who have to repay student loans, or support a family, unless the issues of low pay and insecure conditions of employment are addressed. As a participant said:

the union, (the New Zealand Educational Institute), can only push so hard, the Ministry of Education has to agree in the end to better pay and conditions.

Not everyone who enters school librarianship wants to work during school holidays, so allowing flexibility for negotiating the terms and conditions that suit particular individuals is desirable.

The motivation for entering school librarianship may be convenience and having a good work/life balance, but the immense satisfactions achieved in the job keep those who love it happy in the profession. And those whom it does not suit quickly leave.

Working in schools, interacting with young people, promoting the next generation, ‘doing good in the world’, collaborating with and supporting good teachers in what they do, is hugely varied, stimulating and satisfying work. Who would not want to be a school librarian given half a chance?

Suggestions for further research

Research investigating the perceptions that Principals, the Board of Trustees members and Senior School Management teams have of school librarians and what they can do to assist students reach higher levels of achievement, would assist greater mutual understanding. This could draw on a study of why school districts in Arizona decided to retain school librarian positions even in a time of budget cuts (Ewbank, 2011).

As there is a lack of diversity amongst school librarians (of age, ethnicity, and gender) it would be useful to investigate the reasons why there are so few male school librarians, why there are too few younger school librarians, and why do people leave school librarianship?

Finally, the school library profession in New Zealand would benefit from quantitative research that could give a much needed statistical profile of the profession. It would be valuable to know more about general conditions in schools; how many library staff are employed for the roll of the school; what are their qualifications, their hours of work per week, the weeks of the year they are paid for; the salary scale the librarian is on. Such data will help attempts to attract and keep high quality librarians in our schools.