Rickley Park School Library

Demco designed and furnished the library in the new school building to accommodate all the books, an additional reader development area and IT and study spaces.

Mark Bateman (Headteacher) and Aruna Denton (Deputy Head) at the new school had worked together on the old school site and shared a common belief in the importance of the library as the hub of the school. In this case, the hub also means a stock of 20,000 books a large proportion of which had been purchased by the school’s own fundraising.

“It’s all about the books,"says Aruna. “This is at the heart of our vision for our school library. This philosophy extends to staff and pupils throughout the school and is evident when we see just how much our pupils are excited by books, reading and the library. Book fairs are always well attended and the library is in constant use.”

It was important that pupils had a say in what their library looked like and workshops were carried out at the school where pupils talked about what they wanted from their library and helped choose colours and furnishings.

Year 5 representatives on the School Council, Dillon, Jani and Leigh Andrews said: “We’ve seen pictures and the plans of all the different rooms but we are really looking forward to seeing inside for real. We helped pick the colours for the library so we can’t wait to see what it looks like."

The challenge for the designers was designing the shelving space to accommodate such a large amount of stock. Another design criterion was that the school team were keen that there should be no demarcation within the library by reading ability or age, which means that the whole library space is used by all pupils equally.

Utilising every inch of space was important and Demco specified high bays of their Mimi shelving, with integrated seating and a combination of standard and display shelving. IT workstations and study tables and chairs complete this compact but very full library space!