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Presenter: With twenty of Oxfordshire's forty-three libraries scheduled for closure,
communities around the county have come together in protest
But are these cuts really necessary? And how they affect Oxfordshire's already struggling education system?
The county council suggests that the 'Big Society' will be able to provide
the services that it cuts,
but with seven of the twenty closures in Oxford including Blackbird Leys, Littlemore and Headington
which serve some of the poorest areas in the county
questions are being raised over the number of willing & able volunteers.
At the Friends of Bury Knowle Library meeting, Jemma Fowler, a teacher at Bayard's Hill in Barton read
a letter written by her year five pupils highlighting what the cuts meant to them.
JF: In school our teachers set us homework projects linked to the topics we're studying.
JF: Many of us don't have books at home, and even fewer of us have internet at home,
JF :and we use the library to do our research.
I went to speak to Jemma to find out what had motivated the letter.
JF: We were having a discussion about it
JF: and they suggested they'd like to write another letter to the councillors saying
JF: if this facility goes, we're going to be impacted.
JF: If learning is so important, and reading is meant to be improving,
JF: thenÉ
JF: Why is this being taken away from the us? We're going to be the greatest affected.
Presenter: The Central Anti-Cuts meeting drew support from some of Oxford's well-known authors
Philip Pullman: What I personally hate...
PP: about this bidding culture...
PP: is that it sets one community, one group, one school...
PP: against another.
Mary Hoffman: This is an old battle,
MH: Ébut it's a new campaign.
MH: And old war horses like me flare their nostrils and start to rear up when we hear these things...
MH: and good luck to you all.
PP: This is the difficulty of talking about this really.
PP: You can't tell by looking at a class of children...
PP: which one is ready at that particular moment
PP: for that particular book.
PP: A good librarian will, because a good librarian will know the books and know the children.
PP: And that's why libraries aren't just books on shows in a room...
PP: they're also the mind and experience and knowledge of the librarian who's in charge of them.
PP: If those things are cut, they're very, very difficult to replace.
Presenter: Elsewhere in the county, one of the threatened libraries will have a more direct effect on local schools.
It's got to be remembered, whilst this is Langtree Secondary School's library...
as well as our public library,
we have primary school...
and two pre-schools over on the same site
and they use the library weekly.
I put some of these issues to Keith Mitchell OBE,
leader of Oxfordshire County Council.
So, why has the library service
been put up for the proposed cuts?
We've got to take fifty eight million pounds out of our budget this year.
We've exempted two areas only.
One is the fire and rescue services
and the second one is safeguarding children due to the Baby Peter case.
Apart from that we felt we had to
share the cost of the cuts right across the Council.
Do you feel that the 'Big Society' option is a workable alternative?
It has to be. It's the only option - we can't afford to run
forty-three libraries
so we have to look to communities to provide support where we can't.
With Oxford's recent Key Stage One and GCSE results do you feel that the cuts to the library service
is going to have a knock-on effect on education?
This does worry me and i'm particularly concerned that every single
school we have has a library in it.
And I want to understand why we can't improve the library service in the school
to make sure it provides recreational reading as well as educational reading.
With the council's hardline stance on proposed cuts it seems that the communities' efforts may be in vain.
However, with the mass protest on the 12th February, and the Council's vote coming on the 15th
Only time will tell how this story will play out.
I'm Jamie Keene, for Brookes TV.