Libraries Connected is pleased to announce the publication of our Leading Libraries Summative Evaluation Report.

The Leading Libraries programme was supported by Arts Council England through its National Lottery funded Transforming Leadership programme, with additional funding from Libraries Connected and CILIP, Leading Libraries was a 30-month learning and mentoring programme for staff in public library services. The programme ran from September 2020 to March 2022 and was led and managed by Libraries Connected, with the Birmingham Leadership Institute at the University of Birmingham delivering the main component of the programme.

A total of 60 staff from fifteen library services across England took part and within each service, four staff participated in the programme - representing a Head of Service, an Emerging Leader and two potential future leaders who became known as the ‘Powerful Talent’. Delivery was online consisting of a mixture of whole group sessions, whole peer group sessions (network sessions), small peer group sessions (Pods), and service group sessions (Quads). This was supplemented by online resources. Each service was tasked with undertaking a strategic challenge to address an issue of relevance for their service which provided a means of reflecting on, and implementing, learning from the programme.

The programme and online legacy resources based on the programme were developed for use by others beyond the lifespan of the funded programme.

Evaluation of the Programme was undertaken by Evidence Base Research and Evaluation Service at Birmingham City University and was led by Pete Dalton.

The evaluation sought to collect data to investigate the following aspects of the programme: delivery; impact on participants; impact on participating services; and wider impact.

The Evaluation Report is available in PDF format below and you can access case studies from eight of the participating services via the link to the right of this page.