The success of your journey towards implementation of a whole school reading culture will be very heavily influenced by your ability to secure strong stakeholder engagement and adequate resources to sustain the process. Whether you are leading the process from the school library, the English staffroom or any other area within the school, you will need to garner the support of educators, school leadership, support staff, parents and guardians, and key stakeholders in the broader community. To maximise the opportunities available to the school, you may seek additional funding from external sources. To this end, this chapter focuses on stakeholder engagement and resourcing before we move on to considering change management principles more broadly, though you will notice strong interrelationships with other parts of this book.

Research exploring comprehensive school reform in the US found that stakeholders within the school differed in their understanding of comprehensive school reform components:

While stakeholder engagement is an essential component of effective comprehensive change management within schools, it is useful to consider it independently as a starting point so that its importance is not lost among the competing demands of change management.

Planning for a whole school reading culture is also an opportunity to strengthen relationships with key stakeholders in the broader community, as well as fostering new, productive and mutually beneficial connections. Not all schools are currently making the most of possible literacy and reading resources available to them in their contexts. For example, while many schools in the UK make the most of their public library resource, as indicated in their literacy policies, schools in Australia rarely mention making use of these resources though they are also typically available (Merga, 2022a).

Planning for initial and sustained educator and leader engagement

Even if you are used to working alone, when it comes to embedding a whole school reading culture, this should be a team endeavour, led by a competent and inspired leader.

Whenever you implement a new approach in schools, it is important to build in opportunities to evaluate it. You need to have a planned opportunity to find areas that can be addressed to strengthen the whole school reading culture, as well as identifying successes and strengths. Evaluating initiatives and programmes needs to become a norm in schools, with schools allowing and encouraging this kind of process and permitting the reading culture team to deliberately and critically consider what has been achieved, and where redirection or revision may be appropriate. Freedom needs to be given to (at least internally) consider failures as well as successes so that an iterative process of improvement can take place.

Evaluation plays a key role in improving school performance (Pont et al., 2008) and, as briefly touched upon in the previous chapter, every plan for the development of a whole school reading culture should also include clear planning for evaluation of the plan as a whole, as well as its key components. Evaluation involves the processes, data and scheduling used to monitor, measure and assess progress towards achievement of goals (Merga, 2023b). Evaluation in schools can be an incredibly complex process, and this chapter is not an exhaustive coverage of this important area; rather, it may be a starting point from which further reading and learning may be conducted if you wish.

When we think about evaluation, we may automatically think about seeing changes in quantitative data between Point A at baseline (before an initiative) and Point B (after an initiative has been active for a sufficient period of time to realistically expect to see change). However, understanding of how to measure the success of change has evolved over time, with growing recognition of the value of qualitative and mixed-methods approaches. The effectiveness of your plan should not be purely ‘determined by quantitative shifts in achievement data’; ‘qualitative data in the form of the perspectives of students, staff and parents can also be drawn upon’ (Merga, 2023b, p. 117).

Evaluation could and should include multiple forms of data, and capture the perspectives of multiple stakeholders. For example, a school in the UK seeking to analyse the success of a literacy policy was interested in the following data sources.

Anyone who has ever set foot in a school will be able to tell you something about its school culture. As a former teacher, and as a researcher and consultant who has worked with schools in diverse capacities, it doesn't take me long to get a feel for what a school prioritises. Indeed, the more time we spend in a school, the more confident our perception will be, as we have increased exposure to the many tacit and explicit indicators of what it truly values.

Sometimes we may even see direct contradictions between what a school professes to value, and what they actually do in practice, as the shaping of a school culture is about what the school both believes and practises. Sometimes the tacit culture can subsume the explicit, approved culture. A school culture reveals itself in many ways, with students’ academic results being just one of many indicators that those outside a school will draw upon to judge the merits of a school. A school culture relates to the values and norms of a school (MacNeil et al., 2009), and these are communicated by what occurs and is privileged within the school space, given the competing demands and differing resourcing schools experience, and the unique contexts contem - porary schools are situated in.

The point of this book is to justify the transformation of school cultures into reading cultures, and to explain in practical terms how this can be done, drawing on the available research as well as my own experiences consulting with schools. A whole school reading culture cannot be achieved through making superficial or limited changes and commitments. In contrast, it

While there is limited research that has quantified the impact of a whole school reading culture on student reading engagement and achievement, there has been considerable research that has found positive effects of the individual practices featuring in a whole school reading culture, which are detailed and explored in the following chapter.

Schools are dynamic environments. Change is a given in contemporary schools, and may include ‘continuous structural school-wide changes, in terms of curriculum, assessment and leadership’ which leaves school leaders and staff ‘accustomed to both improbability and uncertainty, in terms of what constitutes as best practice when orchestrating change and leading whole school improvement’ (Gear & Sood, 2021, p. 2).

Good schools consistently strive to embrace change where needed, in order to enhance their capacity to meet students’ educative, social and emotional needs. As such, regular revision of practice to align with evidence, emerging requirements and issues will always be a part of schools’ operational processes. Not all attempted changes within schools are successfully implemented, so this cannot be taken for granted. Given its ubiquity, and in some cases, questionable previous implementation, proposed change in schools is often reasonably met with weariness and apathy (Grant, 2009). Moving towards, or strengthening an existing reading culture is a change that will require careful management to garner optimal stakeholder support, and this chapter will provide guidance to this end.

Change management

Simplistically, change management in schools can be viewed as the transformation of a school-based culture, curriculum, system, process and/or environment ‘from one status to another in a planned or unplanned manner’ (Hoşgörür, 2016, p. 2030). As such, change within schools is not always carefully planned and delivered; it can occur spontaneously, or due to unforeseen events such as the onset of a global pandemic. Ideally, we want major changes that reshape school practices and cultures to be informed by careful implementation planning and close consideration of how to best facilitate change management. As such, across contexts, planned change management involves enacting ‘deliberate activities that move an organization from its present state to a desired future state’ (Stouten et al., 2018, p. 752).

Having a research supported but also practical understanding of how best to plan for building a reading culture, and facilitate change management successfully within your school, is a transferable skillset that you can draw upon beyond this project. Much has been written on the topic of change management, though this literature is typically focused on change management within corporations and professional workplaces more generally, rather than specifically on schools.

Reporting can be a very satisfying opportunity to reflect on and showcase what you have achieved as a school.

You put in the time and effort to implement a whole school reading culture, and the school's achievements should be celebrated. You will need to ensure that your stakeholders remain abreast of what you have achieved, so you will be reporting to diverse audiences. To this end, this chapter is primarily concerned with determining avenues and audiences for reporting for impact across the project, with the argument for the importance of early stakeholder communication already articulated in Chapter 3. I will not be going into detail on internal reporting, because every educator has some knowledge of reporting to the ‘usual’ parties (e.g. school leadership). I’m sure you will establish and maintain reporting to these stakeholders without needing any guidance from me.

Instead, I focus on external reporting, and encourage you to consider how you might expand the scope of your reporting so that what you achieved, and how you achieved it, can contribute to the body of knowledge related to creating a whole school reading culture beyond your immediate school community. I know that this may push some of you outside your comfort zones, but it is definitely worth considering, for the reasons I will delve into in-depth herein.

Ethical reporting

Before we look at different mechanisms for reporting, we need to place the need for ethical reporting front and centre. We need to ensure that our reporting does no harm, particularly given that research conducted in schools, by schools, does not typically collect student consent for participation.

The first priority in reporting is to adhere to ethical standards. We can do this by considering the following.

Remove identifying information before reporting

Where students have contributed their thoughts, experiences and views, we have an obligation to protect this contribution from being associated with them, particularly when accessible by external parties, and where there could be foreseeable negative consequences for these participants. Research suggests that ‘children and adolescents are most willing to participate in research when they feel safe’ (Crane & Broome, 2017, p. 205), and removing identifying information before reporting is one way that protection from exposure to external scrutiny for individual participants can be managed. This may involve using pseudonyms or ‘blinding’ the work by adding (student's name) in parentheses. Pseudonyms are definitely preferred for readability.

Think back on your own time at school, and ask yourself the following questions:

• 1 Did your school encourage you to have a lifelong love of reading, or was it perhaps only concerned with reading for the purposes of assessment?

• 2 If you feel that your school encouraged you to have a lifelong love of reading, what was it about your school that led you to this conclusion?

Given that this book is focused on imagining and creating a reading culture, and fostering a lifelong reader identity in young people, critically reflecting on your own experiences as a student can be a good place to start.

Perhaps you found yourself within a richly supportive environment, where reading was celebrated, encouraged and supported. As explored in this book, and as you may recollect if this was your experience, schools can communicate valuing of reading in many diverse ways.

Alternatively, your school may have been a space where enjoyment of reading was positioned as peripheral and irrelevant. If this was you, and yet you are an avid reader, your love of reading may have been fostered at home, never nurtured within your school.

One of the key purposes of this book is to enable you to identify and harness the approaches, resources, and strategies that contribute to a school reading culture whether you had prior exposure to them or not. Even a thriving school reading culture can benefit from new insights that can make the culture even more effective, and help you to foster a love of reading in all of your students.

School culture is influential

Students spend so much time at school, it is vital that the activities, experiences and school cultures they are exposed to build their capacity as lifelong learners who will continue to develop their knowledge and skills in adulthood. Students in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries spend an average of 7,590 hours of required instruction at primary and secondary school (OECD, 2019a), which is no small chunk of time. They are at a formative stage of their lives, and their schooling experiences can have a significant impact on their current and future trajectories. Unsurprisingly, the kinds of learning environments that students experience in their schools impact on their academic achievement (e.g. MacNeil et al., 2009), but students’ experiences in school can also shape their behaviours and beliefs well beyond their schooling years.

I hope that by the time you reach this stage of the book, you arrive with strengthened confidence in your ability to roll out or rejuvenate a whole school reading culture in your context.

While I have presented a vast array of options and pathways with research support that you might pursue, please use this book as a tool to inform rather than dictate your choices. Please seek to establish a whole school reading culture that reflects the unique needs of your school, following the process that resonates with you and your team, and aligns with your current resourcing constraints.

Literacy proponents and policymakers often fall into the trap of proposing that a single solution can be the answer to all students’ literacy problems. As I have explored extensively elsewhere, this is almost always problematic given that learners have diverse strengths, needs and backgrounds (Merga, 2020a). While building students’ motivation and opportunities to read in a reading-supportive culture can make a big difference to students’ literacy attainment, specific targeted interventions that address students’ literacy gaps, as well as cover the required literacy curriculum, will be needed too.

While not the only essential literacy initiative for schools, increasing reading engagement by fostering a whole school reading culture using research-supported strategies can transform students’ literacy learning, as well as their attitudes towards reading and related literacy-supportive activities. It will probably not independently solve all issues concerned with literacy that your students face, and ‘integration of direct skills instruction and motivation interventions might produce synergistic effects and optimize gains in reading performance over time’ (Toste et al., 2020, p. 446). To this end, you go a long way towards enhancing student literacy when you pay close attention to making gains in motivation and opportunities to read, while also offering a range of additional targeted literacy interventions as explored in my previous book (Merga, 2023b) and through the work of many other researchers. Many of the strategies that underpin a whole school reading culture yield significant gains for SLLs in particular (e.g. reading aloud to SLLs as explored by Westbrook et al., 2019), so a whole school reading culture can play a key role in closing the gap for these students as part of a multifaceted strategy.

As I explore in this chapter, there is a wealth of research exploring the benefits of a range of socially and environmentally mediated practices designed to build reading engagement and a reading culture in a school. Simply, reading engagement cannot continue to be ignored as a crucial support for enhancing students’ literacy performance. We need to foster whole school reading cultures that seek to improve students’ attitudes towards and frequency of engagement in literacy-supportive practices such as reading, and do this alongside the explicit literacy skills instruction that ideally should be occurring across subject areas (e.g. Merga, 2023b).

As previously noted, young people who believe that reading remains important beyond learning to read are nearly twice as likely to read daily than those who did not share this view (Merga & Mat Roni, 2018a), and we cannot take for granted that students understand the importance of an ongoing commitment to reading. A survey of Australian children aged 6–17 found that only 58% of children understood that reading books for fun is highly important, and children's views on the importance of reading may decline dramatically by age (Scholastic, 2016a).

But how can we effectively encourage students to enjoy and value reading according to the research? What are evidence-supported practices when it comes to building reading engagement?

I explore research-supported practices that can feature in a whole school reading culture here, drawing on key research findings, and making reference to current research that has been released since my earlier book in this space (e.g. as reported in Merga, 2018a). While there are some good auditing tools that have been created around fostering a whole school reading culture (e.g. National Library of New Zealand, n.d.-a; n.d.-c), the links to the extant research in such tools can often be cursory, so reading this chapter will equip you to make a strong argument to support the implementation of any of the strategies detailed herein.

Opportunities for regular silent reading for pleasure

If we want young people to be readers, we need to provide opportunities for them to read. With research ‘linking volume of reading to reading achievement and oral reading fluency’, it is surprising that this educational practice is peripheral in many contemporary schools (Allington, 2014, p. 22).