ACT election 2020: Liberals promise to recruit teacher librarians as parents call for school libraries to be protected

Liberal spokeswoman for education Elizabeth Lee said the party would commit $15.5 million to recruit up to 50 teacher librarians over four years.

"Teacher librarians are able to provide literacy support, are able to provide a creative digital and broader learning environments and work hand-in-hand with the exemplary great work of our classroom teachers.

"There's no doubt that under this ACT Labor Greens government teacher librarians have not been valued for the enormous contribution they make to the education and the future of our children and we want to ensure that under a Canberra Liberals government that changes."

ACT Council of Parents and Citizens Associations spokeswoman Cate Furey said the council supported the pledge and called on other parties to match the promise and commit to protecting libraries themselves.

She said only four out of 10 public schools had a library that was staffed by a qualified teacher librarian.

Majura Primary School, where Ms Furey is the president of the parents and citizens association, does not have a full-time librarian but has two teacher's aides who maintain the space.

"A lot of parents that I know don't even realise that that's the case," Ms Furey said.

"When you say we don't have a librarian at our school, they're shocked because they just assume that we do.

"When we all went to primary school we all had librarians at the school and that was part of the school life."

Ms Furey said schools had to decide whether to use their budgets to employ a full-time teacher librarian but it could be at the expense of something else.

"When it comes to the public school system, they're constantly being squeezed."

Education Minister Yvette Berry said Labor would announce its plans for ACT public schools in coming weeks.

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Ms Berry said the 2019 data showed there were 34 qualified teacher librarians employed in ACT public school libraries, and one of those teachers was part time. There are 88 government schools in the territory.

"The decision to employ a teacher librarian is made by schools, in consideration of the specific needs of their students and school community," she said.

Ms Furey said another issue was that the library space was taken into consideration when calculating the capacity of public schools.

Mawson Primary School and North Ainslie Primary School were among the schools who had to give up their dedicated library space to be used as classrooms.

"We're calling for libraries to be quarantined and protected, to be permanently excluded from school capacity calculations. Extra classroom space needs to be created in another way - with more schools and school expansions where that will work."