Transcript
SARAH:
When you're writing a report, it's important not to fall into that trap of trying to report everything. You've got to make it far more focused. So we can look at the school's long-term goals and aims, and we can look at their mission statement, and we can look back and think which reports that we write are going to have the most impact, which ones need to be delivered to those stakeholders.
How we construct the reports really depends on what we're trying to achieve, but we want to aim really for a mixture of statistics and perhaps some anecdotal evidence as well. We are librarians and we know that we love a story. So if we can put in little stories about to exemplify what we're trying to put over to those stakeholders, they will enjoy that. And also when they write the school report, then having a little anecdote to put into that school report makes a big difference if you're a senior leader.
We need to think about the relevance of the data tables that we put in there. Why are they there? What are they doing? How are they going to add to that report? It might be data that we've taken from our library management system, we might be looking at the footfall in our library, or we might be looking maybe at some library social media accounts that we've got and seeing how those have been used not just by students, not just by staff, but maybe the wider community as well.
Another thing I used to find really useful and I have to say it boosted up my self-esteem, was to have a diary and every time somebody commented on something on the library, I would write down that comment in this book. So when I was having a bad day, I can look back over it and see the good things that had happened, but also it was so useful for that report.
We need to be aware that when we write reports, who is going to read them? And we might want to change the language, or the style of the report, or even the order of report, depending on if it's going to a senior leader, or a governor, or a parent. We need to be aware it could be used by different people and adapt accordingly.