Australian School Library Association > Policy > Policy Statement - School Library Resource Centre Funding

Policy Statement - School Library Resource Centre Funding

Funding is determined by needs-based budgeting derived from the curriculum, student and collection needs identified through the ongoing process of analysis and evaluation. An additional factor to be undertaken into consideration is collection size.

Teaching and learning outcomes are enhanced when adequate resources are available at the time they are required by students.

A table of base collection size, relative to enrolment, has been developed from a national survey of levels of resource provision in Australian schools. This table is published in Learning for the future: developing information services in Australian schools. (Bibliographic details of this publication are given below.) This base collection size provides a basis for resource funding.

To maintain the collection at the recommended level with a 10 percent annual replacement rate, expenditure is based on a per student amount. This is calculated thus:

Number of items }

recommended at } x 10% x average price of resources

the collection size }

To determine the extent of additional funding requirements the following factors should be taken into account:

• distance and isolation from major centres and access to supplementary resources from other agencies such as public libraries;
• existing quality of the school's resource collections;
• degree of dispersal or centralisation of the school's resource collections, e.g. multicampus schools, and their accessibility to students and teachers;
• access to resource-sharing networks (interschool, Statewide, national) and interlibrary loan facilities;
• special populations of students with particular language, cognitive, cultural or other needs an abilities, and related resource needs;
• changes in curriculum emphases, e.g. new courses in post-compulsory years;
• establishment costs of new collections for at least the first five years;
• upgrading technology(approximately 20% per annum);
• sudden growth in student numbers.

It is recommended that schools determine interim targets relative to available funds and their ability to expend them.

(Source: Australian School Library Association and Australian Library and Information Association, Learning for the future: developing information services in Australian schools, Curriculum Corporation, 1993.)

Adopted November 1994