The Australian School Libraries Research Project

Australian School Libraries Research Project Report 1: A snapshop of Australian School Libraries

Annual school library budgets

In this survey 86 (12.518%) of the schools reported an annual library budget of less than $1000. A further 113 (16.448%) schools reported an annual budget of less than $5000. In all nearly a third of the survey participants (28.996%) received less than $5000 for their school libraries. Across the whole survey group 45.123% of schools received less than $10,000 as their annual budget. Few libraries reported budgets over $50,000 (8.296%), and these tended to be the large independent schools. Figures 16-17 illustrate the annual budgetary support for school libraries in Australia.

Figure 16: Annual budget, all schools

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 17: Annual budget, by state

 

Figure 18: Annual budget, by school type

 

Figure 18 indicates a higher commitment to school libraries by the independent schools sector. It could be argued that school size and level will have a major impact on the provision of expensive resources and overall budget. Using the NSW dataset (106 schools), table 2 below indicates that schools generally provide the funds for the bulk of electronic database subscriptions which are very expensive. Few of these resources are centrally funded, and as expected, primary schools and smaller secondary schools appear to be missing out on access and the opportunities afforded by these resources. These results also indicate a lack of central provision for these resources by systemic education sectors.

School Type	Primary (55 schs)										Secondary (51 schs)
	Lib funded						Centrally funded				Lib funded					Centrally funded
Sch Pop		<100	100-500	500-1000	1000+	<100		100-500	500-1000	1000+	<100	100-500	500-1000	1000+	<100		100-500	500-1000	1000+
No. Schs		8	27	18	2	8		27	18	2	0	11	22	18	0		11	22	18
Anglican 8schs		-	-	-	-	-		-	-	-	-	1	2	2	-		-	-	-
Catholic 31 schs		-	1	-	-	-		3	-	-	-	-	2	7	-		-	3	1
Govt 60 schs		-	3	5	-	-		2	1	-	-	1	2	1	-		1	2	-
Christian 3 schs		-	-	-	-	-		-	-	-	-	-	-	1	-		-	-	-
Other 4 schs		-	-	-	-	-		-	-	-	-	1	1	1	-		-	-	1

Table 2: NSW - Subscriptions for electronic resources, by school size, level and type