Issue 24 Spring 1998 Books for Special Children Sheila Ray	Collections under which this       article appears:       Special Needs Related Articles or Resources

Even if they have now seen many of the programmes, few children's librarians can have reached the end of 1997 without knowing a lot about the Teletubbies, who were launched on BBC2 television on the 31st March. The Teletubbies have been a phenomenal success, achieving national fame in an amazingly short space of time, the subject of debate, of cartoons and humorous and learned articles, appearing on the financial pages and cropping up unexpectedly in the nation's news.

The younger generation of school and children's librarians, however, may not be aware of the fact that Anne Wood, the creator of the Teletubbies, has long been a very good friend of librarians and children's books. Over thirty years ago, she set up the first Children's Book Group for parents and other adults interested in children's books. In 1965 she launched the magazine, Books for Your Children, to inform parents about books and authors their children might enjoy reading, but which teachers and librarians also found useful. This magazine helped to promote the idea of the Book Groups, which were set up all over Britain, and in 1968 came the foundation of the Federation of Children's Book Groups, a movement in which many librarians have been closely involved over the years, and which is still flourishing today.

In the 1970s, realising the power of television but also believing ultimately in the power of books, Anne Wood persuaded, Yorkshire Television to put on The Book Tower, a weekly programme about books for children, with Tom Baker, already a familiar Dr Who figure, as the presenter. The way in which television penetrated children's lives could not be ignored. Anne moved into making TV programmes for young children, in which the emphasis was on story and for which books and comics were soon provided, notably Rosie and Jim and Tots TV with Tilly, Tom and Tiny. However, through all this activity, books continued to play a very large part in Anne's work.

In 1977 Jean Russell, a former librarian, who had been Chairman of the Federation of Children's Book Groups during its tenth birthday year, joined Anne, who had originally been a teacher, in her flourishing enterprise. In her first magazine editorial Jean emphasised the importance of 'sharing books with children at home'. I first met Jean when she was Jean Bell and a school librarian in London, at a YLG Conference in Exeter in the mid-1960s. In the meantime she had married and moved to Cheshire but had continued to bring books and children together through storytelling activities and had become very active in the Federation. She and Anne had also been responsible for mounting an ambitious 'Fairy Tale Quest' exhibition at Sudbury Hall, the National Trust property in Derbyshire. This exhibition was designed by Errol Le Cain and the Book Tower programmes were subsequently filmed at Sudbury. Jean represented the Federation on the Committee of the British Section of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) and I have happy memories of our meetings there and, as a souvenir, I have a signed copy of The Methuen Book of Strange Tales (Methuen, 1980), which she edited and was signing at the IBBY Congress in Cambridge in 1982.

Jean was a chronic asthma sufferer and in her early twenties spent a year in hospital. She once wrote, "Nothing can quite prepare you for the physical and emotional shock of ... an unexpected long stay in hospital but there are things that can help and books are one of them." (Books for Your Children 14(2) 1979.) Sadly, she died suddenly in January, 1983, at the age of 43. That year she was posthumously cited as the winner of the Eleanor Farjeon Award by the Children's Book Circle. Anne paid tribute to her as someone who 'gave unstintingly of her love and her time in bringing children and good books together' (Books for Your Children 18(1) 1983) and immediately set up the Jean Russell Gift to honour her memory. Each year this provides a gift of books to disabled children.

The first Jean Russell Gifts were awarded in 1984, a gift consisting of books, a book token and a book trolley, going to each of three families nominated by BREAK, a national registered charity that provided holidays and short-term and emergency care for handicapped and deprived children. It was originally intended that recipients would be found through the various medical charities but this idea did not work particularly well and in 1985 readers of Books for Your Children were asked to make nominations. Inviting nominations from what might be described as the general public is a not uncommon practice and is often done through magazines and newspapers; this of course puts limitations on the meaning of 'public' in the context of a particular award, but awards for Brave Children, Best Nurse, Best Mother or Most Helpful Postmistress are often dependent on the recommendation of one person.

Over the years, Books for Your Children recorded the Gifts and their recipients and their delight in the books - in 1987 Alice, aged 13, with juvenile arthritis but a keen wheelchair footballer, in 1988 two children who attended a special needs school in Kingston-upon-Thames. Presentations often had to be made in the child's own home or school but imaginative ways of doing this were found; in 1989, for example, the gift was presented by two of the actors taking part in a production of The Hobbit in Birmingham. On one occasion, in 1993, the Gift was made to an institution, the Birmingham Institute for Conductive Education.

In 1984 Anne Wood set up Ragdoll as an independent British production company to develop television programmes for young children and in 1993 The Ragdoll Shop was established as part of the company's headquarters in Stratford upon Avon. Here a lot of space is devoted to imaginative play areas, including a large scale Ragdoll canal boat, the home of Rosie and Jim. The shop also carries a good selection of quality children's books, which thus come to the attention of many adults who might not dream of venturing into a conventional bookshop. A mail order service is provided and is well used. Anne and the Ragdoll staff feel that it's been important to absorb the promotion of quality children's books into the work of the company. In 1995 Books for Your Children came to an end, evolving into Carousel, which became an independent enterprise with a new editorial team.

In 1996 I was invited to become a Trustee for the Jean Russell Gift. That year there was only one nomination - for a five year old at a special school in Dundee and so, for the 1997 Gift, it was decided to ask for nominations in the Ragdoll Catalogue in the hope that this would attract a wider range of applications. the announcement about the Gift was accompanied by a colour photograph showing Lisa looking at the books and tapes she had received in 1996.

The 1997 Catalogue went out in the autumn of 1996 and letters soon began to arrive. Children were nominated by relatives; one father wrote in but otherwise all the letter-writers were female - mums, grandmothers and aunts. Even in the case of the father, it was the mother who rang me in response to a follow-up letter. I was asked to do this follow-up to find out a little more about the twelve children who had been nominated. It might just have been feasible to visit two of the children but the rest were so widespread, from the south coast to Manchester, from Essex to North Wales, that to have visited them all would have been impossible. Only a few letters included a telephone number and in any case I felt it would be unfair to ring up out of the blue some months after people had written to Ragdoll. So I wrote a personal letter to each nominator, adapting it to the information they'd already supplied and asking questions so that we had more or less the same information about each child. I enclosed a stamped-addressed envelope but said they were welcome to ring me if they preferred, which a few of them did.

Having been a librarian, working with both public children's libraries and school libraries for many years, I was naturally interested to find out about the access that these children had to books and what kind of books they enjoyed.

The ages of the children arranged from 31/2 to 17 but most of them were of primary school age. The educational provision seemed good in that all the children went to school, although some of them obviously suffered general ill health which led to long absences. Some did have access to books at school but poor funding and lack of choice were frequently cited as reasons for school libraries not being very satisfactory. So, how did public libraries fare? These could be a real life-line for disabled children but there are problems of getting the children to the library, let alone into them.

Some letters described libraries that are inaccessible to wheelchairs, or that are too small to provide a good choice of books; problems can be caused by disruptive younger siblings, by not being able to afford to pay charges if books are overdue or accidentally damaged and by children just being overwhelmed by the building and atmosphere and reacting so badly that their parents didn't wish to repeat the experience. Some of these comments may be the result of perceptions rather than facts but, nevertheless, they were made by parents who would be able to make good use of libraries and who were very book-orientated themselves.

Ironically, one of the children who seemed to be very well catered for was the one who lived in the remotest and most isolated area. She had attended a special needs school in a town some distance from her home for four days a week since the age of two. Her two older siblings used the library in the nearest town and brought books home for her. Quite a number of the children suffered from cerebral palsy but others had rare complaints which affected both physical and mental development. Jennifer was a five year old suffering from hydrocephalus, cerebral palsy and epilepsy; her main pleasure lies in books and having stories read to her. The first things she wants to do when she gets home from her special needs school is to get her book out of her school bag. She is lucky, with access to a good public library and attending a special needs school that her mother described as 'lovely', which sends books home with her; her mother said she loved the Alfie and Annie Rose books, especially those which include 'Grandma'.

• "The things we read with Jake are the TV Tots comics, touch and feel books, books with flaps and books with pictures of a cat, dog, house and so on. Stories have to be fairly short as he lacks concentration so books with bright pictures to point to and talk about are best."
• "At school Adam is learning to read using the Oxford Reading Tree books [these were mentioned in several letters] which include characters, Biff, Chip and Kipper, which Adam really enjoys. The teacher says he has no problem reading and will soon be able to pick it up. [The local library] is very small so there isn't a great deal of choice. Adam does enjoy a visit to the library, he loves to choose his own books. He usually reads with myself or his grandma."
• "Jamie is a very bright and cheerful girl despite the problems she has ... she enjoys drawing, painting and going for walks in her wheelchair but her favourite pastime is having books read to her."
• "Despite James's many physical disabilities he is a very bright alert boy and loves nothing more than listening to and following with deep concentration his favourite reading books ... James really enjoys very colourful story books ... he has his favourite books read to him by many people, his Mum and Dad, his Auntie Sue, especially of course both myself and his Grandad."
• "Zak has had a strong interest in books since he was tiny, which is great because sitting reading together gives us both a bit of "time out" and keeps us both sane when times seem more difficult ... We read anything and everything and have been known to spend an hour reading the Yellow Pages and Telephone Directory, laughing at the funny names."

Whatever their handicaps, all these children get a lot of enjoyment from books and they are also lucky in that there is at least one adult on hand to act as mediator. This reflects the situation described in Dorothy Butler's Cushla and Her Books (Hodder & Stoughton, 1979), a detailed account of how good quality picture books helped a child with severe developmental handicaps. I hope that every reader of this article has read and been moved by Dorothy Butler's book. When I first read it, my reaction was that if books could achieve what they did for Cushla, what more could they achieve for 'normal' children? Reading the letters that came in on behalf of children who could benefit from the Jean Russell Gift, I was given evidence of the richness that books can bring to the lives of all children, but it was sad that there was little mention of the best children's picture book illustrators whose work is represented in most children's libraries. It is not always easy for librarians to identify children with special needs or their guardians if they do not identify themselves but working with medical charities and their local branches and with special needs schools will, I hope, continue to be a priority in every children's library programme.

Postscript

All the children whose guardians responded to the follow-up letter were given a Jean Russell Gift in 1997; this consisted of twenty books which included an illustrated anthology of stories, a book of nursery rhymes or poetry, a lavishly illustrated traditional tale, a pop-up and books by some of our leading picture book artists, from Janet Ahlberg to Brian Wildsmith. There is a Jean Russell Gift Fund, but this is supplemented by Ragdoll, by generous gifts from publishers and by Peters Library Service, Birmingham, who also provide the freedom of their showrooms for the selection of the gift books.