Book Bands are a system used by most schools in the UK, alongside other strategies such as phonics, to develop reading skills. Publishers produce reading schemes of books that are predominantly designed for schools. Some schools just use one reading scheme, while others may use a mixture of schemes from different publishers. Each publisher often uses a different scales to rate the reading difficulty level of their books, but for most you can compare these to the more common schemes. We have chosen to add books to this section of the site using the colour banding system alongside Oxford Reading Trees levels. The books you will find here are not generally from reading schemes that you will find in schools. On the site you will find a selection of phonically de-codeable books and brilliant picture books that can help bring pleasure and joy when learning to read. These books are not exact matches to the reading scheme books. However, for example, a child working within book band purple should find the books we've selected in the purple section a good level of challenge.

Books inspired by the Waldorf Steiner tradition