Secondary school libraries & age appropriateness

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Can anyone tell me how their child's library is organised.

Whilst I acknowledge that dd is now going to be exposed to a wider range of books & subject matter than she was in primary I'm a little bit shocked

She bought a book if poems home last night that were all in the subject if murder, think it was called Criminal Minds

Some were by classic authors & playwrights, subjects included the Moors Murders. The one I thought particularly inappropriate was all about a mother calling her baby names for "shitting" & being violent towards it, ending in its death

She said there was a book depicting sex on the cover with graphic swearing in the blurb right amongst the Philip Pullmans.

Am I being pfb?

Our school sent a letter when they joined year 7 telling us they allowed &
KS3 pupils to borrow books considered to be suitable up to 14 years old. We had the option to opt our children out of this arrangement.

If we want Y7 ds to read books considered suitable for over 13s we have to send in a note to the librarian. I'm not sure what they consider to be over 13 material mind, as Lord of the Flies has just come back on the Y7 book list (though with a PG rating!). I think we read that at school when I was about 15 but that was many years ago before the Hunger Games turned them all hard!!

At dds school books that are only suitable for children above the age of 15 are marked with a coloured sticker. For younger children to borrow them, parents have to sign a form to say they agree to their child reading this material.

One of the books is defiantly adult in content , the other is a vampire version of Romeo & Juliet. I dread to think what the one she didn't bring home was like.

Lol mimble. Dd was in a girls version of the play last year playing Piggy (they only did extracts though).

They have a separate section for yearss 7&8.

I've never really looked to see what sorts of books they have where.

My DD was given a book in year 7 that had violence, genocide and rape in it. The school had invited people in to hand them out to the children!

Seriously, I'm not a fan of censorship of books.

Censorship no- but giving a young for her age year 7 nightmares.

Kids need to be mature enough to handle certain subjects I think.

Imo (having been a sensitive child myself) one of the most useful skills to learn in this respect is to self regulate.

She is plenty old enough to go to the local library on her own or to a bookshop; she needs to learn that if certain subjects upset her then she has a choice between avoiding them or taking the consequences.

Secondary school means greater independence. It means parents won't always be there to protect you from unpleasantness or inconvenience, that to a certain extent you need to do that for yourself.

I would just gently point out to her that if murders give her nightmares, then she might be better off not borrowing books about murder.

What Cory said.
I'm - ahem - quite a bit older than a Yr7, indeed, long since past 18, but I don't like 'scary' things or 'horrors' so, when I read the blurb (be it a book or a film) I make a choice not to take out a book that is going to unsettle me.

At our school the books are given age-ratings. It's something like 14+ and 16+. Everything else is okay for anyone to read.

If you have a child under 14 who wants to borrow a book from the 14+ range, they are given a permission form by the librarian. If a parent signs it then the child is allowed to read books from the 14+ section.

As far as I know, they still wouldn't allow an under-14 to borrow something from the 16+ section.

Strictly speaking we have a sixth form only section, but since DD is a librarian Game of Thrones just came home without her bothering to check it through the system. She freely admits she's read quite a lot of those shelves.

The thinks is that dd quite likes so horror, murder mystery type stuff. But there wasn't any indication that this book was quite so adultin content.

The school takes students up to Level 6 diploma so the age goes from 11-21 year olds.

I think at this age we can't protect them against anything: they have to learn that themselves. If she goes through the nightmares, then she will learn when to stop reading if the contents of a book are too much for her.

I suffered badly from nightmares in my pre-teens. And learnt a lot about myself and how to handle my own imagination.

Besides, it is going to be increasingly difficult for a school to know what is appropriate for whom the older their students are.

Also different children have different triggers. When I was your dd's age a horror book would have freaked me out but I could probably have coped with a book about murders like you describe. What really totally scared me, though, was accounts of people drowning in confined spaces- so perhaps a good job I didn't go to school in a country where the Titanic is part of the curriculum in Infants school: I would have struggled with that in Sixth Form. Which of course wouldn't have been a reason to ban every other sixth former- or even every other primary school child- from reading about it.