The scale of looming council cuts is sending shivers through the country. Few are more nervous than those who feel like grouse on August 12 – low-flying and an easy target. By that I mean the experts, often in the arts, who provide services too often labelled adjuncts or luxuries, nice but inessential, desirable in an ideal world, etc, etc. Thus, as councils try to balance their books, and the sound of stalkers draws near, thousands from this arena will be quaking. There are many I could write about whose endangered status is alarming, among them specialists who provide music and drama in primary schools, and library staff in public libraries, too many of whose posts have already been axed. However, today’s lesson, as it were, is about the petition that is being considered this week by MSPs.

‘Save our School Libraries’ was submitted late last year as those in the book world grew anxious about the threat that cuts will pose to libraries and professional librarians in schools, leaving some areas woefully under-provisioned. Already a few of the fault lines are clear. As the petition states, “In 2015 the following authorities have proposed cuts to school library services: East Renfrewshire, South Lanarkshire, North Lanarkshire, Falkirk Council. Other proposals already approved include sharing librarians between schools in Glasgow, and replacing librarians in North Ayrshire, South Ayrshire and Fife with library assistants. Some schools, such as Dumfries Academy, have handed responsibility for libraries over to English teachers, and a number of councils have reduced librarians’ duties to term-time only.”

Initiated by Duncan Wright, librarian at Stewart's Melville College, and backed by Literature Alliance Scotland and writers such as James Robertson and Christopher Brookmyre, it offers straight-talking, irrefutable evidence of the positive impact of school libraries on literacy and students’ attainment and self-confidence. Since Nicola Sturgeon has made closing the gap between poor and well-off one of her flagship goals, of which improved literacy is a fundamental element, it is hard to see how the government can fail to embrace and facilitate the petition’s calls for a national strategy on school libraries that will enshrine the principles they stand for and currently deliver.

It is also difficult to imagine a serious politician failing to recognise the part that school libraries play in helping to shape the awareness and prospects of the young. Save our School Libraries cites research from, among others, Robert Gordon University, that proves their value, but while statistics are essential when countering a climate of unthinking, panicky or wilfully ignorant retrenchment, they tell us little we could not have guessed ourselves.

A school library offers advice on books by highly qualified staff – “we are not just book stampers,” say librarians wearily, a phrase so often repeated they probably mutter it in the sleep. It is also a space for dedicated learning across all subjects. While library funding is viewed as falling into the area of so-called soft and dispensable subjects, whose value in the ‘real world’ is rarely understood by bean counters, biologists and mathematicians find them useful as well as would-be poets and novelists.

But a library does more than nurture relaxed, focussed learning and discovery. A school without a properly run library is not a school. Would you want your child or grandchild educated in a place that didn’t have one? A library is a statement in itself, about aspiration, intentions, enlightenment, and an appreciation of the complex needs of the young which go far beyond the demands of the curriculum, and reach deep into their personal lives. Without a library and a qualified librarian, a school becomes robotic or mechanical, like an engine whose parts are all equally important, but who cannot function at its best without the lubricating oil that allows the whole system to motor.

The role the school library plays in stretching imaginations, offering new possibilities and providing the escape that only a book can hold is beyond price. While its part in improving exam results is the sort of statistic that a government and its budgeting authorities must acknowledge, for me that is not its most crucial contribution. A school library is a world of its own, as is every book it holds. Encouraging young readers to discover those worlds and feel at home in them can be the start of a lifelong relationship with the written word that is just as important as grades.