Administering the PRC
Staff and teachers across South Australia do a wonderful job of promoting reading and the Premier’s Reading Challenge – thank you for your dedication, care and creativity!
Most of the information you require about the Challenge is contained in the Guidelines and across the site (e.g. Booklists).
A brief outline of the role of the PRC Coordinator can be found here.
Following are issues that arise regularly from schools…
Keeping Student Reading Records – File Management Suggestions
We advise Student Reading Records to be kept for at least 3 years after the student has left your school. For example records of students who were in year 6 in 2021 may be disposed of in 2025. Please keep reports printed at data entry, and the awards lists sent to you each year by the PRC office for the long term in case queries arise for past students. These could be kept electronically to save space and paper.
A sensible option is to save all student reading records electronically and discard the paper records each year. Or, get the students to fill out their reading records on the computer and save them to a class file, which would save printing them out and help to avoid lost records.
SA Public Libraries
Public libraries across South Australia strongly support the Premier’s Reading Challenge. They play an integral part in the program by providing books for students to borrow.
Many of the books in the booklists can be downloaded for free or borrowed in hardcopy format through the statewide OneCard library catalogue. Your OneCard allows you to borrow and return Premier’s Reading Challenge books to any of the public libraries across South Australia.
→ Join online at libraries.sa.gov.au/join
→ Search the library catalogue for PRC titles at libraries.sa.gov.au
→ Access the digital services, including PRC ebooks and audiobooks at libraries.sa.gov.au/digital
→ Read parent and family information about the PRC at libraries.sa.gov.au/prcparents
→ Read teacher information about the PRC at libraries.sa.gov.au/prc
→ Contact your library or council for any further information at libraries.sa.gov.au/locate
Students’ Interstate Participation Acknowledgement
If you have students who have moved to your school from interstate and have completed the Premier’s Reading Challenge in their old school prior to moving to SA, we are more than happy to update our records to include their previous participation.
Please note that we cannot give students retrospective awards, but will award them in the current year according to the number of years completed both interstate and in SA.
As we do not have access to the interstate records, we require the following steps to be undertaken:
- Students requiring acknowledgement of interstate participation show their school’s PRC coordinator the certificates they received interstate.
- PRC coordinator then contacts the PRC office via email (prc@sa.gov.au ) and provides the following information:
- Student’s name
- Current year level
- EDID number (this is the long number on EDSAS with a letter on the end.) – Government schools only
- Date of birth
- Which years the student completed the Challenge interstate
3. PRC staff will then add the student to your school for the previous years, and the student will receive the next award according to how many years they have completed the Challenge overall.
Students who are relocating to another school (local or interstate)
Please ensure that their PRC record goes with each student to their new school, and that the student and their parents are clear on what level the student is “up to”.
Award Level Enquiries – students new to your school
To find out what award level a new student at your school is reading for this year, please email prc@sa.gov.au with the following information for each student so we can ensure we get the correct student’s details:
- Full name (including any previous names, alternative names, nicknames)
- Gender (current and previous, if changed)
- Date of birth
- Previous school
- (For Government sites only) EDSAS ID (long number with a letter on the end, from EDSAS) – please note that this is not the student ID.
Then we can look up the students required and let you know where they are up to in the Challenge, and ensure their records will match up when you enter your data this year.
Booklists
There are around 8,000 books on the PRC booklist. Not all books remain in publication but they remain on the list because these books can be found on library shelves around the State. Some students may choose to read and add out of publication books to their reading record.
Twice a year, a new PRC list of contemporary books is made available to schools and libraries to consider adding to their shelves. These lists are circulated by email to coordinators.
