About Us

A short history of Australian Standing Orders

In the late 1970s, Standing Orders was commenced in Australia by Darren Ryan (an ex-teacher/librarian) and Ken Jolly (an ex-teacher, now Chairman of Scholastic Australia). The service was established to provide teachers and librarians with the best newly-published children's books, complete with teaching notes. The service was run out of Dromkeen, the National Centre for Picture Book Art, then part of Oldmeadow Booksellers.

A decade passed and Scholastic Australia purchased M&M Educational Supplies located on Queensland's Sunshine Coast from Ron and Jan McCarthy. M&M was a complementary school supply business to Oldmeadows in Victoria. Ron and Jan wished to stay as part of Scholastic and having heard of the established Standing Order service, requested to be involved for northern NSW and Queensland.

A couple of years later, Ron and Jan, while running Sunshine Book Fairs for Scholastic, asked Scholastic to permit them to market Australian Standing Orders nationally. This arrangement continued until Ron's resignation from Scholastic in 2010.

ASO was conceptualised by Scholastic and has always been run under Scholastic management. Editorial credibility is the cornerstone of this service and Scholastic's own published books are subject to the same selection process as books from any other publisher.