The 2023 Softlink report has been released for 2023 and I am FINALLY getting around to writing up my thoughts on it. I am pleased to see that there was a significant increase in respondents this year, particularly in New Zealand! As a result, two separate reports, one for Australia and one for New Zealand have been released.

If you’re new here, you can read my opinion on the 2020 to 2022 Softlink Reports here.

To access these reports, you can download them from this page. Please note that you will need to provide some details to download them but I promise it’s worth it!

TLDR: Part 1 of 3 – Decide if this Part is for you!

Before you read on, I should clarify that this blog post got a lot bigger than originally planned. I am in PhD data analysis mode and clearly, that mindset has translated across to this post because I have found myself asking more and more questions this time. So, I have decided to break up my opinion piece on the report into three parts:

Part 1 = Participant observations – who knew I’d have so much to say about the number of participants!

Part 2 = Deeper dive into school library budgets and staffing – I think there’s power in understanding and exploring like-with-like where possible.

Part 3 = Summary of other survey findings – I’ll briefly cover other interesting aspects and finalise my thoughts.

I will make sure I come back and update the posts with the links to the other parts when they’re posted too!

There are 14 sections throughout the reports, each providing a detailed look into different areas of the data. While I won’t be diving into the specifics from the data comparing the different school types in detail, there’s great data in there that is helpful for school libraries and teacher librarians looking for comparable data to their own context, so please don’t sleep on the other sections!

Participant data in Aus (p. 6) and NZ (p. 6) reports

As I mentioned earlier, there was enough of an increase in participation this year for there to be two reports published!

The 2023 respondent numbers are certainly not quite up there with 2020 and 2021, but it’s so exciting to see the numbers back up over 1,000 in total! I want to thank everyone who participated in this survey. I know that survey fatigue and work intensification (as well as many other factors) potentially impacted people’s ability and capacity to complete this survey but I’m so glad that so many school library staff took on the challenge and participated. Let’s keep that momentum going!

Country	2020	2021	2022	2023
Australia	1,696	1,595	861	951
New Zealand	386	364	39	110
Total	2,082	1,959	900	1061

What’s most interesting about the participants in the 2023 survey, was the differences in the size of the school the survey respondent was participating from. For example, 71 more schools were represented in NZ this year, with AUS increasing by 90 schools. While these numbers are relatively similar, it should be noted that there are 9,629 schools accounted for by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA, n.d.), and while it is not clear whether all of these schools have a school library professional* employed to run the school library (or even HAVE a library…), this does mean that of all the schools in Australia, just under 10% responded to this survey.

*Please note that I am encompassing all individuals who have some sort of formal library qualification working in or running the library. This includes Certificates, Diplomas, Bachelors, Graduate Diplomas, Masters, and any other formal qualification I’ve missed!

Meanwhile, in NZ, there are approximately 2.500 schools across the country, and with 110 having participated in the 2023 survey, that means that 4.4% participated. While the number is still small, it is not that far off from being comparable to the percentage of schools that participated in the Australian survey. In fact, if the same increase happens in NZ for next year’s survey, and Australia stays pretty steady, then that gap will reduce to a representative sample of 7% (NZ) and 10% (Aus). Considering that NZ has no formal recognition of a school librarian/teacher librarian position within their schools, and Australia has an entire state where each school is required to have someone employed in that position with many other schools throughout the other states employing teacher librarians too, it certainly makes for interesting comparisons.

This is not me taking a dig at the number of participants in either survey this year, nor is it a dig at those who didn’t or couldn’t participate!

It’s me pointing out some interesting points and thinking out loud. Plus, I’m practising my statistical analysis! Either way, the increase is fabulous and I would love to see ever MORE participating next year too, so make sure you share the link when it arrives in your inbox.

The 2023 respondent numbers are certainly not quite up there with 2020 and 2021, but it’s so exciting to see the numbers back up over 1,000 in total! I want to thank everyone who participated in this survey. I know that survey fatigue and work intensification (as well as many other factors) potentially impacted people’s ability and capacity to complete this survey but I’m so glad that so many school library staff took on the challenge and participated. Let’s keep that momentum going!

One other thing that I wanted to touch on from the participant demographic data provided on page 6 of both reports. Generally speaking, the demographic statistics of the sample are fairly comparable:

Notable statistics from participants included 14% of Australian participants identifying their schools as having between 1 and 199 students, with an additional 10% identifying their school as larger than 1,400+ students.

In NZ, 38% of participants identified their school size as being between 200-399 (19%) and 400-599 students (19%). Additionally, schools between 200-399 students represented 25% (1/4) of the NZ sample size. This group was the largest group across both reports.

While the figures across the different school sizes are fairly even, there are still some interesting considerations about school size. For example, the largest difference between the two country’s participants was in the schools with more than 1,100 students (a difference of 10%). The larger number of smaller schools (1-199 students) in Australia (14%) compared to NZ (3%) could also be a contributing factor to the number of participants who responded.

On the surface, the spread of schools seems a little skewed in NZ towards state-supported with 92% of respondents (52% integrated and 40% not) identifying state-government-alignment and 8% identifying as private. However, it gets a little complicated when you dig into the way that NZ schools are funded, governed, and even how they select curriculum. I won’t go into it here but if you’re interested, here is a detailed breakdown of what the different school types are in NZ, including how they choose their curriculum and how they are funded.

Australian schools are almost as confusing funding-wise, but the curriculum decisions make much more sense (at least to me, an Aussie TL). What is clear though is that from both countries, the larger percentage of responses come from participants in a state-aligned school. It would be very interesting to know how this has come about because based on my experience and knowledge, in Queensland Australia, there are more private/catholic schools with qualified TLs than state schools but there is a variety of library management systems (LMSs) used in these schools, and while Softlink does send their survey out to non-Softlink customers, I do wonder how much of an impact this has. I say this because in NSW all state schools use Oliver (Softlink’s LMS) and are therefore customers of Softlink which might mean they get more reminders to complete the survey. This is all hypothetical and I have absolutely no data to support these conclusions but I am making what I think is a reasonable inference. Would love to dig into this further!

Before you explore the school type statistics, please note that there are more school types identified in NZ than in Australia. The way the schools are separated is also very different, so year levels have been identified in ( ) after each school type. I have modified the Australian school type labels a little to try and capture the truest translation of type that I can for each state; however, it should be noted that my interpretation may not be accurate. This is also something that I would love to dig into more!

To make some sort of comparison, I am going to combine the NZ school systems in the best way I can to have three similar categories as the Australian schools. I am choosing to do this because in my mind, it makes more sense to group ages together as best I can so that there is a level of understanding towards the activities and types of support needed across all the participating schools from their school libraries.

So, the NZ Department of Education states that Contributing schools (0-6) tend to send students off to an Intermediate school in preparation for Secondary school. However, seeing as this division happens after the 6th year, which is the same as Australian primary schools finish, I am going to combine the Contributing schools (13%) with the Primary schools (23%) to make a total of 36% of participants in NZ from “primary” schools.

I have then decided that the Intermediate schools (6%), and both types of Secondary (18% & 33%) (especially as apparently is often for Intermediate school students to end up in the 9-15 Secondary schools) shall also be combined, meaning a total of 57% for “secondary” schools.

Composite appears to be a combination of any year levels from 0-13 and while the F-12 schools in Australia tend to have all year levels (not just a small selection), I feel that the wide-ranging ages these two types of schools cover makes sense for them to be compared.

This means that with this division of school types for simplifying the data, we have:

School type	Australia (participant %)	New Zealand (participant %)
Primary	47	36
Secondary	30	57
F-12	17	7
Unidentified	6

If in doing this, I have managed to misrepresent the data, especially with regards to NZ schools, please let me know as I am still learning but, I believe that seeing it presented like that helps to make some easier comparisons country-to-country. From this method of organising the data, a clear trend towards secondary schools participating in the survey is evident, whereas in Australia the largest participating school type was primary.

From this, I have questions about whether NZ schools have primary libraries, especially ones with qualified staff and what is happening in their secondary schools that resulted in them being the larger contributing group? Even if I had not manipulated the data, it is still clear in the combined percentages of the two types of secondary schools in NZ that these were the larger participant school types.

Another small note about the participant data: It took me a few goes to double-check whether or not responses were missing in the Australian school data for school types. In adding up the provided percentages, I realised that 6% of participants were unaccounted for, or approximately 57 participants if that helps you visualise it. This has me wondering if the three categories included in the survey (or at least in the report as I do not actually get to see the survey now that I’m no longer IN a school library) were not quite able to capture everyone’s school type OR did 57 people decide they were uncomfortable answering this question OR did they not see it OR… so many possibilities but definitely something to explore in more detail.

Final thoughts for Part 1

I really do support this survey and the vital data it gives us. We need as much evidence as we can get and I am so grateful that Softlink opens up its data-collecting services to ALL school libraries in Australia AND New Zealand. This means we can collectively build a bank of evidence to support the vital work we do in school libraries. I am looking forward to exploring the other parts of the reports soon (hopefully with a quicker turnaround time than this blog post took) and would love to hear your thoughts!

References

Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. (n.d.). School numbers. Reporting. Retrieved July 12, 2024, from https://www.acara.edu.au/reporting/national-report-on-schooling-in-australia/school-numbers

Ministry of Education. (2024, February 20). About NZ’s network of schools. Education in New Zealand. https://www.education.govt.nz/school/new-zealands-network-of-schools/about/

Softlink Education. (2021). Australian school library survey report 2020 [PDF]. https://www.softlinkint.com/downloads/2020_Softlink_School_Library_Survey_-_Australian_Report.pdf

Softlink Education. (2022). Australian school library report 2021 [PDF]. https://www.softlinkint.com/downloads/2021_Softlink_School_Library_Survey_-_Australian_Report.pdf

Softlink Education. (2023). The 2022 Softlink Australia and New Zealand school library survey report [PDF]. https://www.softlinkint.com/downloads/2022_Softlink_School_Library_Survey_Australian_NewZealand_Report.pdf

Softlink Education. (2024a). 2023 Australian school library survey report [PDF]. https://www.softlinkint.com/downloads/2023_Australian_School_Library_Survey_Report.pdf?

Softlink Education. (2024b). 2023 New Zealand school library survey report [PDF]. https://www.softlinkint.com/downloads/2023_New_Zealand_School_Library_Survey_Report.pdf?