by Sarah Pavey PhD
More than 14,800 international schools now teach close to 7.4 million students worldwide, and the sector keeps growing (ISC Research, 2025). That kind of growth puts pressure on every role in the building, but few roles have shifted as quietly, or as significantly, as the school librarian’s. A brand-new study of librarians working across twenty countries and half a dozen curricula found a role that has already moved well past its old job description, if only more school leaders had noticed (Harrison & Turpin, 2026).
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐉𝐨𝐛 𝐍𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐝𝐲 𝐖𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐞 𝐃𝐨𝐰𝐧
Ask ten international school librarians what they actually did last week, and you’ll get ten different answers, and that’s rather the point. Harrison and Turpin’s (2026) study, based on interviews with librarians who have worked in twenty countries, found a role that stretched from navigating host-country censorship laws and building home-language collections to running staff training on generative AI and shaping how a school markets itself to prospective families. Some described near-total autonomy and being treated as the resident expert. Others still fought to be seen as more than a room with books in it. The difference, almost every time, came down to whether senior leadership saw the librarian as a strategic instructional leader or a caretaker of stock, echoing Harland’s (2019) earlier finding that librarians’ cross-curricular reach puts them in an unusually strong position to lead, if a school lets them.
That gap between potential and permission is exactly what The Networked Librarian (Pavey, 2024) sets out to close: librarians move from support staff to strategic partners by building relationships, building their own confidence, and learning to describe their impact in language a headteacher already understands. A newer international collection, School Librarians and Principals Leading Together (Oberg & Marquardt, 2025), makes the same case from the other side of the desk, arguing that a library’s success rests far less on how hard a librarian works alone than on how genuinely the principal treats them as a partner in strategy rather than a manager of resources.
𝐅𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐑𝐢𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐄𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐜𝐭
Hand a librarian real leadership responsibility, and the effects show up well outside the library walls. Three places worth watching:
In the classroom: Media and Information Literacy (MIL) is arguably the defining skill of this century, and it sits squarely within the school librarian’s expertise. With a mandate to lead, they can build curriculum-aligned programmes that teach students to research properly, weigh sources critically and communicate their findings clearly.
In the staffroom: Librarians work best when they’re not siloed off from teaching staff. Sitting in on departmental meetings, joining school committees, or co-planning and co-teaching lessons gives them a different lens on curriculum design, and those relationships deepen every time they’re invited into the room rather than left to ask.
Across the community: An international school is, by its nature, a meeting point of cultures, and a school librarian who champions that diversity through the collection and the programming becomes a quiet but powerful force for belonging, provided their work is visibly tied to the school’s own mission and values.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐍𝐞𝐱𝐭 𝐓𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐅𝐚𝐜𝐞
The OECD released its latest PISA results for 2025 recently, and buried in the announcement was something every school leader should note: from 2029, PISA will assess a brand new domain, Media and Artificial Intelligence Literacy (MAIL), testing 15-year-olds worldwide on how well they evaluate digital content, understand the ethics of AI, and collaborate responsibly with these tools (OECD, 2026). That gives schools a few years’ notice, and it’s hard to think of a better-placed lead for this work than the school librarian – the information handling expert in your school.
It’s a theme I explore in my forthcoming book, Third Space Approach to Media Literacy: How Media Mavens in Schools are Changing the Game (Routledge, 2027). This argues for reimagining the school library as a genuine “third space”, somewhere between the formal classroom and the informal, social life of the school, where students, teachers, and librarians form a team of “media mavens” sharing responsibility for a media-literate school culture. It reframes the librarian from sole custodian of resources to convenor of a wider, cross-curricular effort.
This is precisely the strategic, leadership-facing skill set our course, “Leading Your International School Library,” is built to develop. If your school is wrestling with AI in the classroom, misinformation, or how to prepare students to be discerning consumers and creators of media, your librarian may be best placed to lead that work, given the platform to do it.
𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞 𝐇𝐚𝐬 𝐀𝐥𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐲 𝐋𝐞𝐝
Since launch as an online course, Leading Your International School Library has run in person in Shanghai (May 2025), Frankfurt, Germany (September 2025), and both Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (May 2026), gathering a genuinely global community of library leaders along the way. This November it lands at Keystone Academy in Beijing, and the story from every stop has been consistent: delegates leave with more confidence, sharper strategic thinking, and ideas they put into practice almost immediately.
Here’s a pattern worth knowing about, though: librarians are often the last people to put themselves forward for this kind of opportunity. Many are so used to meeting everyone else’s learning needs that asking for their own doesn’t come naturally. A 2025 survey of nearly a thousand school library professionals across 63 countries found much the same: most did not feel senior leadership actively noticed their leadership potential, even when they appreciated their day-to-day work (Merga & Mat Roni, 2025). That gap is exactly where you come in. Spotting your school librarian’s potential and inviting them to attend, rather than waiting to be asked, tells them something a job description never could.
𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐃𝐨𝐨𝐫𝐬 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐂𝐚𝐧 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐧
The case for librarian leadership isn’t in question. The harder part is making it happen. A few concrete places to start:
Send them, don’t just tell them to go: There’s a real difference between mentioning a conference in passing and actively putting someone’s name forward for a leadership-focused course like “Leading Your International School Library.” Across two in-person days covering everything from strategic leadership and collection curation to digital literacy and impact measurement, it’s designed to help a librarian apply leadership thinking to the role they already hold.
Pull up a chair at the table: Add your librarian to school-wide planning committees, curriculum groups, or technology working groups. The more they understand what different stakeholders actually need, the more precisely they can shape the library’s offer around it, and the more visible their contribution becomes.
Hand them the microphone: A librarian who never gets airtime will never build a profile. Ask them to present at a faculty meeting, put them forward for a conference slot, or encourage them to write up what’s working. It inspires colleagues and raises the library’s standing in one move.
What Changes When You Say Yes
Backing your librarian’s leadership is an investment in where your school is heading. A school librarian equipped to lead can turn the library into the liveliest learning space in the building, shaping critical thinkers, responsible digital citizens, and students who feel genuinely connected to the wider world. Leadership skills travel too: a librarian confident in managing people and situations builds a team culture where colleagues feel able to contribute, take risks, and grow, helped along by feedback that’s honest as well as encouraging.
The wider effect is cultural. A librarian leading with the school’s strategic priorities in mind can shift how the whole community sees the library, not as a side room, but as infrastructure for student success. Push for information literacy across every subject, back the sensible use of new technology, and keep reading alive as something students choose to do, and the ripple runs well past the library door.
None of this is about handing over authority for its own sake. It’s about giving someone room to empower others, try new things, and build a shared sense of direction. Move past the idea of the librarian as manager and curator of stock, and you’ll find someone unusually well placed to connect the different corners of an international school (staff, students, and families alike) and to dissolve the silos that so easily form between them.
The leader was already there. All they needed was your yes. A good first move: pick up The Networked Librarian, then give your librarian the chance to build on it at Leading Your International School Library, next running in Beijing on 6–7th November 2026.
𝐑𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐬
Harland, P.C. (2019). An Investigation into the Leadership Behaviors of School Librarians: A Qualitative Study (psu-etd-160), [Doctoral thesis, Plymouth State University], https://summit.plymouth.edu/handle/20.500.12774/331
Harrison, A. & Turpin, B. (2026). Librarians at International Schools: An Exploratory Study. School Libraries Worldwide, 31(1), pp. 44–66. https://doi.org/10.29173/slw8829.
ISC Research (2025). Data International Schools. https://iscresearch.com/data/
Merga, M.K. & Mat Roni, S. (2025). School library professionals’ perspectives on current and future workforce challenges. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 58(1), https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006241309104
OECD (2026). PISA 2025 Results (Volume I): Future-Ready Students. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/73451bc5-en
Oberg, D. & Marquardt, L. (eds.) (2025). School Librarians and Principals Leading Together: International Perspectives. Bloomsbury.
Pavey, S. (2024). The Networked Librarian: The School Librarian’s Role in Fostering Connections, Collaboration and Co-creation Across the Community. Facet.
Pavey, S. & Goldstein, S. (2027). Third Space Approach to Media Literacy: How Media Mavens in Schools are Changing the Game. Routledge.
Sarah Pavey, PhD, FCLIP FRSA, Independent education consultant, SP4IL; Librarian Trainer, LYIS
𝐋𝐘𝐈𝐒 is proud to partner with 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐂𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐚 𝐄𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧.