Since January 2007 we have been touring the UK with our Story-Go-Round project, aiming to train library staff and bring them together with special schools. Through this, we hope to leave a local legacy of multi-sensory storytelling and inclusion of youngsters with profound and complex needs. Region by region, we match special schools with libraries, demonstrate storytelling with local children, train library staff, and follow up with story-packs and additional support.

Local libraries are perfect places to start: they know the importance of children's literature, they are at the heart of most communities and they are now more open to inclusion. But very few librarians have experience of working with children with profound special needs. Not all have access to the skills and resources needed to deliver a welcoming, accessible service.

Each day we visit a different library which hosts three story-telling sessions (usually with three different special schools from the local area). This develops the interest of library staff through a "safe" environment by observing and learning about the children's needs, with someone else in control. A fourth session at the end of each day is a training programme giving library staff the skills they need to tell a multi-sensory story themselves. We then follow up the visit by sending a selection of story-packs to each library.

Our new “Telling Tales” project

Our new Telling Tales project got under way in the Autumn Term of 2009. The project, which is funded by the Big Lottery Fund, aims to train librarians in multi-sensory storytelling by mentoring them at six storytelling sessions throughout the year.

The first session simply gives the librarians the chance to observe a trained storyteller using Bag Books for a storytelling session with children from a local Special School. As the sessions go on, the librarians do increasingly more of the storytelling themselves, until they are confident enough to arrange and run the sessions themselves once the project is over.

In the first year, the project covered four regions of England but the second year will see it expanded to the rest of England. We will then have a total of nine regions each with ten sets of trainee librarians and each planning six Storytelling sessions – that’s 540 extra sessions on top of the 290 odd we usually do in a year.

Comments from the Librarians currently being trained include:
“I am picking up the text of the stories and also the techniques involved in the multi-sensory storytelling. Well done and thank you - invaluable training.”
“Wow, I’m really encouraged by the children’s response to my storytelling. It was interesting to see how the repetition built up their anticipation and enjoyment of the storytelling.”
“I enjoyed the storytelling session today. It will help me to deliver the stories on future dates when going out to nurseries and pre-schools and with groups coming to the library.”

In the photograph above, a librarian practices their multi-sensory storytelling at Chippenham Library. The story being told is “Gran’s Visit”, one of our oldest stories and last year’s best-seller. Here the letterbox rattles and a letter arrives from Gran saying she’s coming to stay.