St Andrew's: The Heart of Learning at Bradfield - Bradfield College

Emily Stannard is the Head Librarian at Bradfield and leads the team that manages the St Andrew’s Study Centre. She has visited libraries since she was a child but she understands that a library, or Study Centre, is not necessarily a draw for everyone. So this is where she, her team of information professionals and St Andrew’s will make the difference.

Emily is a qualified Chartered Librarian, but is not perhaps the librarian you remember from your time at school. She is keen to make sure that St Andrew’s is accessible and relevant to all, irrespective of a pupil’s year group, study preferences or whether the pupil was a habitual or infrequent user of the Garrett Library. St Andrew’s will be a space for everyone.

I THINK THAT IT’S IMPORTANT TO MEET YOUR USERS AT THE POINT AT WHICH THEY ARE, RATHER THAN AT THE POINT YOU MIGHT EXPECT THEM TO BE.

Emily’s conviction to create this all-embracing learning experience comes from her mixed relationship with the facility. When she was at secondary school Emily explains that the library was run by a Classics master who she found terrifying. She never felt at ease, fearful of making a noise and dreaded using the building. Contrasting this experience with that of university, where she learned how to embrace the opportunities, she vowed to break the school library stereotype and be a different kind of librarian – or information professional.

Emily’s first role after receiving her Masters degree was running library inductions in a Further Education college for vocational courses, everything from mechanics to fashion design and music. The attendees were not perhaps your traditional library-going types but she wanted to find out how she could make the library relevant and accessible for them. So, she spent time talking to the various groups of students to find out what they were interested in and what they needed and developed a concept of what ‘library support’ looked like for them. She quickly realised that people did not just come to a library for the information on the shelves, they came to meet up with their friends and fellow coursemates, and they came to share ideas, do projects and make plans.

St Andrew’s will be home to around 11,000 books, but it will not be a library
St Andrew’s Concept, Neil Burch, Senior Master & Learning Design Lead

St Andrew’s may not be a library but of course the books are still very important. The shelves in the Study Centre are filled by the mainstay of the current collection that is housed in the Garrett Library, carefully curated to meet the needs of the curriculum whilst at the same time retaining books of historical value and significance. The process to ensure that the collection was relevant to the curriculum has been an ongoing project for Emily since her arrival at Bradfield ten years ago.

THE LEVEL OF ACCESS TO RESOURCES PROVIDED BY ST ANDREW’S WILL BE VERY MUCH ON A PAR WITH THE LEVEL PROVIDED BY UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES.

The facility will allow pupils to access the huge wealth of resources that lie beyond the confines of the physical collection. The College subscribes to many different information portals, such as Britannica School, JSTOR, MASSOLIT and ‘Gale in Context’ databases and publications, such as The Economist and the Hodder Education Magazines, providing users with a hybrid facility, both digital and physical. The level of access provided by St Andrew’s will be very much on a par with the level provided by university libraries so College pupils and staff will continue to benefit from this amount and quality of information at their disposal.

Running a library also requires professional support to ensure that the provision is as good as it can be –

you are only as good as your information resources. If your resources are out of date, or all over the place, then you are not going to derive the benefit from the facility that you should.

Whilst the online resources can be accessed by every pupil from their personal laptops, fitting all the books into St Andrew’s has not been nearly such an easy task but is one that has been very thoughtfully undertaken. As a conversion that seeks to maintain the historical integrity of the building, standardised bookshelves in which to house the collection were out of the question. So, this left Emily with the interesting challenge of organising a collection in such a way that makes sense for the building as well as for the user.

Libraries use a classification system to group related materials together so that they can be easily stored and found. The most common classification system used in British public libraries is the Dewey Decimal Classification and indeed it was the system used in the Garrett library. Emily explains that while Dewey provides a fantastic broad logic for the classification it doesn’t always work for expanding fields of knowledge such as climate change. Neither did Dewey know what curve balls the design of St Andrew’s or the new Faulkners’ curriculum would throw into the mix, so to accommodate all these variances, more creative licence was required.

TO ENSURE THAT THE COLLECTION TRULY SERVES THE NEEDS OF BRADFIELD PUPILS I HAVE CHOSEN TO OVERLAY DEWEY WITH HOW THE SUBJECTS ARE GROUPED WITHIN THE CURRICULUM, CREATING A HYBRID SYSTEM THAT IS BESPOKE TO BRADFIELD AND THE NEEDS OF BRADFIELD PUPILS.

Unlike the main collection that will always be accessible, the Repository Collection, comprised of the older books that have been retained for their academic value but are unlikely to be requested frequently, will be stored on the higher shelves above 2m where they can be protected, admired from afar and accessed if and when necessary. Other books of significance, including those written by Old Bradfieldians, are stored within the archive area where they can provide inspiration to today’s pupils.

If St Andrew’s is at the heart of the College, then the information professionals, Emily and her team, are the beating heart of St Andrew’s, poised to help the pupils make the most of the amazing facilities it provides.

A ROOM FULL OF BOOKS IS NOT A LIBRARY, IT TAKES A PERSON, AN INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL, TO BRING THE SPACE TO LIFE IN THE SAME WAY THAT A ROOM FULL OF BEDS AND MEDICAL EQUIPMENT IS NOT A HOSPITAL, YOU NEED TO PUT THE PROFESSIONALS IN THERE FOR THE PLACE TO FUNCTION.

‘We’ve worked hard to create a space for all pupils that will work for different learning styles and the different stages of their education.’

Visit our dedicated St Andrew’s Project webpage for more information and if you would like to make a gift in support of this transformative initiative it is still possible to do so, contact our Philanthropy Lead Kirsty Perkinson on kperkinson@bradfieldcollege.org.uk or call 0118 964 4846.

From the May 2024 issue of

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