Welcome to part two of my opinion piece on the 2023 Softlink report. The first part, available at this link, covers my thoughts on this year’s participant numbers.

My plan for this post is to dive deeper into school library budgets and staffing. I think understanding these aspects is powerful, as they are crucial for school libraries to function effectively.

Please also note that while I will provide general comparisons between Australia and New Zealand (NZ), as I am an Aussie TL, I will dive more deeply into the Australian report.

If you’re new here, you can read my opinion on the 2020 to 2022 Softlink Reports here. If you’re interested in drawing your own conclusions you can access these reports from this page. Please note that you will need to give some details to download them but I promise it’s worth it!

So, let’s get stuck into the data collected about school library budgets and staffing.

Exploring budget and staffing

A general overview of findings is presented in Section 3.0 Survey Findings Summary of both reports. This is a great place to get a snapshot of respondents’ answers to key questions about budgets, staffing, library space, responsibilities, promotion, alternative formats, support, and engagement. I’ve collated the percentages I was most interested in for this post for you in the following table to show a comparison between the two countries:

Key Finding	AUS	NZ
Adequate budget	57%	53%
Adequate staffing	48%	62%
No change in staffing levels	65%	85%
Change in staffing levels	Increase = 9% Decrease = 26%	Increase = 13% Decrease = 10%

Australia vs NZ Budgets

At first glance, the responses from both countries are similar. For example, there is only a 4% difference in participants identifying their budgets as “adequate.” While the difference is similar, it does concern me that just over half of respondents in both countries identified their budget as “adequate.” This is particularly concerning given that the percentage for this same question in the 2022 report was 54% (and yes, I acknowledge that there are issues of comparability due to the combination of Australian and New Zealand data in the 2022 report, but I think measuring and reporting in percentages does allow some level of comparison). I maintain my opinion about the adequateness of budgets in school libraries – it worries me that 43% and 47% of participants in Australia and NZ, respectively, reporting not having adequate budgets.

Focusing on Australian Budgets

In addition to the summary, both reports offer a larger breakdown of responses about budgets in Section 4.0 School Library Budgets. This section provides tables and figures that display the data under three categories:

1. Approximate library budget for all schools;
2. Budgets by school size; and,
3. Budget changes.

The findings in 4.1 Approximate library budget for all schools provide a brief overview of all reported budgets from participants, grouped into dollar amount categories and displayed by percentage. While it is interesting to see at a glance which category of budget amount has the largest percentage of participants (21% identified their school budget as being between $2501 and $5000), I do not think it provides as much value as the findings presented in 4.2 Budgets by school size. I say this because I think there is an advantage in being able to see if there are any links between school size and budget size, as you would expect these factors to be related. Therefore, while 4.1 gives a good snapshot of all budgets reported by participants, 4.2 is where the gold is.

When comparing budget size and school size, there are some clear, expected trends. For example, a large percentage of the smallest schools (between 1 and 199 students) have smaller budgets (93% reported less than $5000 budget), and the larger schools (1400+ students) have larger budgets (89% reported more than $10000 budget). While this was not surprising, I wondered if there was a better way to highlight how this looks and why it is an issue for equitable, quality education.

I decided that it would be good to compare how a budget could be stretched to cover different school sizes. To help put that in perspective, I started thinking about what this means in terms of the ratio between budget and student numbers, so I did a little math to figure that out.

*Please note that the following is based on my calculations using the processed data presented in the report, not the raw data. My findings are more hypothetical than a reflection of reality, but I still enjoyed the exercise and found the comparisons interesting. I hope you do, too!

Budget upper limit ($)	Range of dollars per capita ($) for smallest school size 1 to 199 students	Range of dollars per capita ($) for school size 1100 to 1399 students
1,000	1,000 to 5	0.9 to 0.7
2,500	2,500 to 13	2.3 to 1.8
5,000	5,000 to 25	4.5 to 3.6
7,500	7,500 to 37	6.8 to 5
10,000	10,000 to 50	9 to 7
20,000	20,000 to 101	18 to 14
50,000	50,000 to 251	45 to 36
50,000+	50,001 to 252+	45.5 to 36.5+

The calculations in the table above were made with my decision to use the upper limit of the budget category. I also decided to use the second largest school size category (1,100 – 1,399 students) rather than the largest (1400+ students) because it gave me clearer boundaries to calculate values. This means I can show the range of the budget available in each bracket for the smallest number of students to the largest in the school size category. For example, a school with 1 student and $20,000 would have that entire budget to spend to support the learning of that one student, whereas if the school had 199 students, that $20,000 would become approximately $101 per student. This means that schools that fall between 1 and 199 students will have anywhere between $101 and $20,000 per student, depending on how many students they have. If I had used the 1400+ students category, I would have been limited to showing the minimum amount available for spending per student, which would be similar to the amount available for 1,399 students. This is important to remember when reading the following analysis.

When looking at the data more closely, 93% of smaller schools reported less than $5000 budget. I calculated the dollars per student based on the assumption that the schools had 199 students, which means:

• 28% reported less than $1000 = up to $5 per student;
• 37% reported between $1001 and $2500 = up to $13 per student; and,
• 28% reported between $2501 and $5000 = up to $25 per student to spend.

Therefore, of the smallest school category (1 to 199 students) the majority (at 37%) reported operating with a budget of up to $13 per student (assuming that the school had 199 students and their budget was $2,500).

When comparing the second largest school category (1,100 to 1,399 students), there is an interesting comparison to be made with the budget available per student for the smallest schools.

*Please note I am also using the upper limit of the student numbers for this analysis to show how far the maximum budget would spread for the maximum number of students in these categories.

So, looking deeper, 83% of the second largest school size category reported having more than $10,000 budget, including:

• 21% reported between $10,001 and $20,000 = $14 per student;
• 38% reported between $20,001 and $50,000 = $36 per student; and,
• 24% reported more than $50,000 = $36+ per student

It is interesting to compare these figures to those of the smallest schools. The budget category with the largest percentage of schools in the 1,100 to 1,399 students category is the $20,001 to $50,000 budget category, meaning that a school with 1,399 students and the maximum budget can spend up to $36 per student. This is almost three times the amount that the largest budget category for the smallest schools ($13 per student)!

The alignment of budget size and school size does make sense to me because more students means the need for more resources, but what is interesting is how the amount available per capita in the different budget categories between the smallest and largest schools is quite different. This suggests that the bigger the school, the more funding available and therefore, the more money to spend per student in the school library. While this is not a shock to me, it is good to see that reflected in this data as I think it highlights the potential for inequity in resourcing school libraries around Australia.

However, a couple of small and large schools buck this trend. For example, 2% of participants identified their schools as being between 1 and 199 students and having a budget of greater than $50,000 – this is the smallest school size category combined with the largest budget category. If this school had 199 students and their minimum budget started at $50,000, this means that the school would have approximately $250 per capita to spend in a school year. Imagine what you can do with that each year!

Conversely, there was 1 % of schools in the school size category of 1,100 to 1,399 students who identified their budget as less than $1000, which means that they do not have enough funding to allocate a whole dollar to their students, no matter what end of either category scale they are at! In fact, the only school size category that didn’t have participants identifying their budget as being below the $1000 mark was the largest category of 1,400+ students. It does concern me that there are schools out there with a budget of less than $1000 for their school libraries. This is evidence that makes you realise that we still have a long way to go to ensure all students in Australia have access to great-quality school libraries.

The final sub-section in the budget findings, 4.3 Budget changes, provides a clear list of reasons that survey respondents identified for either increasing or decreasing their budgets that year. The report highlights five reasons for the decrease and six reasons for the increase. What’s most interesting to note is that one reason identified on both lists as having an effect on budgets was leadership changes within the school. This supports some of my own theories and findings, so I’m excited to see this reflected in the data!

The last comment I want to make is about the adequateness of the reported school library budgets and the hypothetical figures I proposed earlier. Section 6.0 Resourcing the library asked participants the following question:

Is your school library budget adequate?

The results were split at 57% saying yes and 43% saying no. While I can’t compare the yeses with their budgets, it does make me think that my decision to use the higher side of the budget categories to work out funds per student was a good decision. While I have no evidence for this, my gut is telling me that the 57% who said yes to adequate budgets would not have said this if they were on the lower end of the budget category scale.

Australia vs NZ Staffing

The other section of the report I wanted to focus on in this post was staffing-related data. Staffing often goes hand in hand with budgets, and I wanted to explore this a little. I also uncovered some surprises that I did not expect, which is good!

Firstly, a quick comparison of NZ and Australian perceptions of staffing numbers. Of the participants in NZ, 62% identified their staffing as adequate compared to 48% of Australian participants reporting adequate staffing (a difference of 14% between Australia and NZ here is worth noting). When it came to no changes in staffing, 85% of NZ participants and 65% of Australians reported no change (a difference of 20%). There was a difference of 16% in participants reporting a decrease in staffing, with 10% for NZ and 26% for Australia. From this, it’s clear that NZ participants experienced more stability in their staffing levels with Australians reporting far more instability, and not in a positive way. This also makes me want to explore the questions in more detail, but at this point, I’m also celebrating this win for my NZ colleagues!

Focusing on Australian Staffing

The other section of the report I wanted to explore in more detail was Section 5.0 School library staffing. This section is also broken up into three sub-sections, including:

1. Staffing by school size;
2. Staffing by school type; and,
3. Staffing changes.

In 5.1 Staffing by school size, there is evidence of a small increase in full-time equivalent (FTE) staff across almost all school sizes! Only two school size categories did not see an increase from 2022 to 2023. These categories are:

• 200 – 399 students = stayed the same at 0.9 FTE staff; and,
• 600 – 799 students = dropped from 1.5 FTE in 2022 to 1.2 FTE in 2023.

I assume these figures are worked out by averaging participant responses in each school size category. However, this is not clear in the report, and I would love to explore this more and compare staffing and budget size on a case-by-case basis. While not all school size categories are back up where they were in 2021, the increase across the different categories from 2022 to 2023 hopefully shows good things to come.

In 5.2 Staffing by school type, the report clearly shows an exciting development for schools that have been identified as Primary/Contributing. The number of FTE staff more than doubled between 2022 and 2023 from 0.8 FTE to 1.7 FTE! Unfortunately, the Secondary school category and the K-12 school category both reported significant declines in the number of FTE staff. Secondary schools reported dropping from 1.9 FTE to 1.5 FTE, and K-12 schools reported an even more dramatic drop from 2.0 FTE to 1.3 FTE. As a secondary TL myself, this makes me very upset. It makes me worry to think about the secondary school students who have had their access to library staff restricted. I am also saddened to think that library staff in schools with students in K-12 are now having to make hard decisions about where to apply their focus and time due to these staffing cuts. This leads me to wonder about who determines what “adequate” staffing should and does look like in school libraries, how this is tracked, and who is accountable for ensuring these levels are met.

An equal number of reasons for increasing or decreasing staffing numbers, five each, were provided by survey respondents in 5.3 Staffing changes. As with 4.3 Budget changes, there was one provided reason that was the same for both increasing and decreasing FTE staff: student enrolments. This really highlights for me the impact of student numbers, which is another thing that I have been discovering and is interesting to have confirmed here too.

Final thoughts for Part 2

So, that ended up being more detailed than I initially intended, but I am enjoying exploring the differences in the 2023 Australian and NZ Softlink reports and some of the more intricate findings.

Part 3 will drop sometime before the new year (I hope). My aim is to provide a summary of other, interesting survey findings. I hope you’re enjoying this series so far! I certainly am having fun writing it.

References

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?

*Note: This blog post has been proofread by Grammarly. I use this tool to check for grammatical and spelling errors. I do not use it to generate content.

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