World Book Day celebrations take place tomorrow and across almost every school in the UK and Ireland right now, someone will be pinning up posters, cutting out bookmarks, co-ordinating costumes and making all the final preparations for author visits, reading assemblies, book-themed bake offs and other activities.
School librarians are the guardians of our children and young people’s reading culture and this is never more evident than on the first Thursday in March. You embed reading for fun into every ordinary day and go that extra mile on World Book Day too.
Our 2025 School Librarian of the Year, Julie Broadbent, is featured in the latest issue of The Week Junior, as a part of their World Book Day coverage. This is a lovely recognition of the work that school librarians do to maintain the magic of World Book Day and give every child the opportunity to discover their reading identity.
At Northampton International Academy, where Julie is the school librarian, the Reading Pioneers book club will be heading out to local primary schools to present assemblies that promote the joy of reading and share tips for less confident readers; the library is hosting quizzes and competitions, including a bookmark-designing contest, to give pupils the chance to win books of their own, and staff will be dressing up as book characters on the day.
Julie won the SLA Secondary School Librarian of the Year Award in 2025 but we know her work is representative of so many school librarians who are orchestrating reading for fun experiences for children and young people this week - and every other. The librarians who were shortlisted for the 2025 SLYA and Peter Usborne Primary School Library of the Year Award shared such an inspiring range of activity with us from running parent libraries to help reading culture extend into the home, to hosting school-wide literature festivals, building partnerships with local public libraries and universities, and even developing brand new school libraries from disused rooms.
The dedication and imagination of school library staff, and the incredible impact they have on the children and young people they support, is why a staffed school library should be an immovable item in every school budget.
We are hugely supportive of World Book Day and of everything the charity does to inspire all children to enjoy the life-changing benefits of reading for fun, but in the quiet before the storm tomorrow, we are also raising a cup of tea to the people on the ground who make those benefits a reality for every single child, every single day. Enjoy tomorrow, and if you're an SLA member, please tag us in your social posts or email us to share more about your World Book Day activity.