The success of your journey towards implementation of a whole school reading culture will be very heavily influenced by your ability to secure strong stakeholder engagement and adequate resources to sustain the process. Whether you are leading the process from the school library, the English staffroom or any other area within the school, you will need to garner the support of educators, school leadership, support staff, parents and guardians, and key stakeholders in the broader community. To maximise the opportunities available to the school, you may seek additional funding from external sources. To this end, this chapter focuses on stakeholder engagement and resourcing before we move on to considering change management principles more broadly, though you will notice strong interrelationships with other parts of this book.

Research exploring comprehensive school reform in the US found that stakeholders within the school differed in their understanding of comprehensive school reform components:

While stakeholder engagement is an essential component of effective comprehensive change management within schools, it is useful to consider it independently as a starting point so that its importance is not lost among the competing demands of change management.

Planning for a whole school reading culture is also an opportunity to strengthen relationships with key stakeholders in the broader community, as well as fostering new, productive and mutually beneficial connections. Not all schools are currently making the most of possible literacy and reading resources available to them in their contexts. For example, while many schools in the UK make the most of their public library resource, as indicated in their literacy policies, schools in Australia rarely mention making use of these resources though they are also typically available (Merga, 2022a).

Planning for initial and sustained educator and leader engagement

Even if you are used to working alone, when it comes to embedding a whole school reading culture, this should be a team endeavour, led by a competent and inspired leader.