Big Summer Book Swap 2024 Highlights

This year, Kent-Teach launched it’s first ever annual Big Summer Book Swap, where schools across Kent submitted 50 books to be swapped with another school. Our swap was a huge success and all participating schools were very pleased with the books they received.

 Our aim with this campaign was to help schools promote a love of reading and also support schools in a time of budgetary need. We know how much hard work goes into creating a welcoming and diverse school and class library and wanted to support our Kent schools with this endeavour. Reading is such a vital life skill and schools play a fundamental role in nurturing the positive attitudes to reading from an early age and with recent studies showing downward trends in reading enjoyment, we want to support schools in providing books that will engage their pupils.

After the registration period, we had six schools take part in the swap:

• Cecil Road Primary School
• Canterbury Road Primary School
• Holywell Primary School
• Brook Community Primary School
• Belmont Academy
• West Hill Primary Academy 

We had an overwhelming amount of books to sort as some schools were very generous and sent more than 50 books to be swapped. With over 400 books received, we are pleased to say that every school received the same number of donated books in return and books were spread out to ensure each school had a range of genres and interest levels. We also want to say a huge thank you to our work experience pupils Alok, Sumedh and Matthew from The Maplesden Noakes School who supported in quality checking our books.

This year we were lucky enough to partner with Bloomsbury who provided the raffle prize for our winner Brook Community Primary School. Bloomsbury were kind enough to provide a range of different chapter books all published within the last few years to add to the school’s collection.

Here are some of our highlights from the Big Summer Book Swap:

If you are interested in registering for next year’s Big Summer Books Swap, please register here. https://forms.office.com/e/Uxs081dfN0  Registration for the next year’s even will close in 31^st May 2025.