Campaign for the Book

My nephew, Charlie Alcock, will be speaking at the Campaign for the Book conference in Birmingham on 27th June. Charlie will be speaking about his work on the CF celebrity cookbook and his own love of reading and writing. Examples of Charlie's stories can be found on the blog of children's writer, Alan Gibbons. Gibbons has been writing children's books for seventeen years and was the winner of the Blue Peter Book Award 2000 'The book I couldn't put down' for his best-selling book Shadow of the Minotaur.

The Campaign for the Book was launched by Gibbons in response to a number of challenges including the closure of some School libraries, statistics showing that only half of secondary schools have a school librarian and only 28% have a chartered librarian, a recent report which claimed that 20% of new Academies have been built without a designated library, and finally, devastating cutbacks in library budgets such as in Doncaster where £622,000 was cut and Wirral where eleven of the borough’s libraries are earmarked for closure. The Department for Media, Culture and Sport has been presiding over the erosion of public library services with 6.3% fewer professional staff and a book stock which is diminishing by two million copies a year.

Take Action for Seven Kings has its own local campaign for library services which has so far been responsible for the introduction of a range of new outreach services in the area. A report detailing the range of outreach services and their impact has recently been prepared by Redbridge Library Services and this can be found by clicking here and finding Agenda item 8.

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Don Byron and The Bang on a Can All-Stars - Credits.