Tony Jones, senior librarian at Emanuel School, London, tells us how changing their library management system turbo-charged their reading culture – with pupils submitting more than 10,000 book reviews in three years

We are always exploring new ways of promoting reading at Emanuel School and, in September 2023, we launched our 100 Book Challenge. Each year group has a reading list of 100 novels which is heavily promoted in the library, with a large, dedicated display space, and by English teachers across the school year. 

To qualify for an award, a pupil must read and review ten books from the list for a Bronze, 15 for a Silver and 20 for a Gold. We moved to Accessit in May 2021 after experiencing problems with our previous system. Accessit’s review function has proved invaluable for our reading challenge: to prove a pupil has read a book, they must submit a 50-word review (minimum), which is then read and verified by a member of library staff. 

The process has been a notable success, resulting in a vibrant library catalogue with more than 10,000 reviews.  

The 100 Book Challenge is now firmly established in school life. We encourage pupils, particularly those in Years 6-8, to get involved, but we don’t force them. Uptake is significantly lower in the older year groups. In the first year, we presented 45 Gold/Silver/Bronze awards, this increased to 87 in the second year and we expect to present 100 awards in this third academic year.  

For a programme such as this to run successfully, it is important to have a very wide range of diverse titles and recently published books, without relying too heavily on classics. If Accessit statistics show a book has not been borrowed much or had many reviews, we replace it, with as much as 40 per cent being rotated every year. All library staff and members of the English Department participate in selecting the lists and the discussions can be intense. 

Because reviews are short, English teachers often set them as a homework task or give pupils the opportunity to add one in the final few minutes of a lesson. It is not uncommon for hundreds of reviews to be added over a holiday period.  

We encourage pupils to be brutally honest with the Accessit star rating system, and only award five stars if they loved the book. This leads to pupils using existing reviews as a mechanism for choosing their next book, resulting in titles which might not be household names becoming incredibly successful. For example, Peadar Ô Guilin’s The Call has 72 reviews and massive borrowing numbers, often through word-of-mouth recommendations.  

It is important to keep the dialogue going between the library, where we monitor the reviews, and the English department. Teachers can add a second level of checking, where pupils also submit their reviews to Microsoft OneNote. Occasionally, we find examples of plagiarism, but with reviews being checked by both library and English teachers, this is much more likely to be detected.  

Visibility is crucial to the success of the 100 Book Challenge. All the lists are available as Accessit Quick Lists, which are widely promoted on our various dashboards and available to parents. For pupils looking to choose a book quickly, we have handy genre or theme-specific printouts available in the library. Each pupil is also given a booklet to monitor their reading progress across the year, which is held by their English teachers.  

Younger children love incentives and competition, so we also release half-termly statistics showing which classes have produced the most reviews in the Lower School (Years 6-8). At the end of the year, the winning Form gets a reward. 

We refer to the 100 Book Challenge as often as possible. I often do themed talks to multiple year groups, and I always make it clear when I mention books that are on the 100 Book Challenge. Pupils are often interested in what others are reading, so I note which books have the highest borrowing numbers too.  

Timing is crucial to the success of the 100 Book Challenge. Not all schools lend books over the summer for fear of losing stock, but for us it is worth the risk. Towards the end of the summer term, around June, we introduce the 100 Book Challenge for the following year. This gives keener pupils the opportunity to blitz the list over the holidays and be well on the way to collecting their Bronze Award when school restarts in September.  

Every year we have a handful of pupils who read every book on their 100 Book Challenge list, so there have been calls for a Platinum Award! Two of our Year 13 pupils, who both achieved Gold Awards over the preceding two years, were offered places to study English at Oxford University in September.  

The administration of the 100 Book Challenge – of collating, tallying, processing, and reading the reviews – is managed by one of our part-time Library Assistants. It can be time-intensive, particularly at the final stages when we are trying to verify whether pupils have achieved the appropriate award, but it is worth the effort.  

Accessit has played a key role in invigorating our reading culture, resulting in our pupils producing 10,000 reviews over five years. Everybody can contribute, irrespective of whether they are participating in the 100 Book Challenge, and if they aren’t inspired by recommendations from library staff, they have a wealth or endorsements from their peers to choose from.  

To hear more from Tony on building a whole-school reading culture, watch our webinar Exploring genres: routes to engaging readers, a recording of which can be found here