Queen Camilla unveils new primary school library
Queen Camilla has opened a new library for Morland Primary School, north London, marking the 1,000th school to be transformed through the National Literacy Trust’s Libraries for Primaries campaign.
As a partner of the Libraries for Primaries initiative, we were delighted to be invited to attend the event. Andrea Quincey, Primary Literacy Director at OUP, represented us at a roundtable to take part in a discussion about the project’s future.
What is the Libraries Project?
The National Literacy Trust is an independent charity that empowers children, young people, and adults with the literacy skills they need to succeed. They work together with local communities to empower children, support schools, and campaign to make literacy a priority.
The Libraries for Primaries campaign was founded in November 2021 by the National Literacy Trust and works towards supporting primary schools in the UK’s most disadvantaged communities, by refreshing and restocking their libraries and book corners, as well as embedding reading for pleasure in teaching practice. The aim is to ensure, through different regional and national programmes and projects, that every primary school in the UK has a library or dedicated library space.
The library opened at Moreland Primary School was also the 50th primary school library supported by the Bloomberg Coronation Libraries programme, which has been set up to provide support to UK primary schools in honour of the 2023 Coronation. Over the past year, the project reinvigorated 50 primary school library spaces, and celebrates the role the Queen has played in supporting literacy projects and encouraging children to read in the year since the Coronation.
Last week, we unveiled a new library at a primary school in Oxfordshire as part of the second year of our Raise a Reader programme, also in partnership with the National Literacy Trust.
The event
On 7 May, Her Majesty unveiled a commemorative Coronation Library plaque before joining the roundtable meeting, which was chaired by Tom Mackenzie, Bloomberg News anchor, and attended by author ambassadors Cressida Cowell, Chris Smith, and Jennifer Cross.
British poet and children’s book author, Joseph Coelho, then hosted a storytelling session in the new library. He read ‘One Thousand Libraries’, which he had written for the occasion.
Finally, Queen Camilla joined storyteller, Alim Kamara, to take part in an interactive storytelling session alongside reading ambassadors and librarians from the school. After the school library was opened, every child at the school was also gifted a new book.
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