Children’s favourites

Children’s favourite books

By Tom Tolkien. This page was last updated on January 2nd, 2024.

Children’s favourite books as chosen by children aged 4-10 and 11-13 in UK schools and educational settings. Here’s a collection of lists featuring 75 books that children will love to read and share in seven primary and three secondary age group categories. There’s a wide variety of classic children’s books, contemporary titles, picture books loved by parents and children alike, funny books, graphic novels, family favourites, highly marketed supermarket bestsellers and the odd surprise!

During the summer term period in 2022, educators, teachers, librarians and teaching assistants in 50 primary schools and educational settings across the country polled their classes to find out which books children had enjoyed the most over the past school year. During the summer term in 2023, we repeated the exercise with 50 secondary schools that surveyed their year groups. Each educator and librarian collated results and submitted a top ten of book titles, anonymously, via a private survey web form link. The question presented to the children was “Think about all the books you have read this year. Which book was your favourite?” Here are their reading choices.

Some books appeared in the raw top ten lists more than once. In these instances – to feature a wider range of books – we placed each of these titles in the age group in which it was most popular. Additionally, with popular book series, we collated the series titles under one heading and featured the series in the year group in which titles in the series appeared most often.

Educators including teachers, teaching assistants, librarians, community outreach tutors, home educators and librarians from a variety of different school types including nursery, infant, primary, junior, middle and secondary settings in community schools, foundation schools, voluntary schools, academies, free schools, 7-11 aided junior grammar school, independent schools, special schools, faith schools, pupil referral units, a home education hub, and a traveller education service. These settings spanned wide areas of the UK and included isolated, rural, village, town, urban towns and cities in minor and major conurbation areas covering a wide range of social and economic settings.

This survey shouldn’t be viewed as a scientific study and it shouldn’t be relied upon as empirical evidence. These lists are a snapshot of what teachers in 50 schools found when they asked classes which books they had most enjoyed over the past year. So, although the findings in these posts shouldn’t be used to prove this or disprove that, or be believed because of x or debunked because of y – the information is nonetheless a thought-provoking insight. We hope this ultimate booklist chosen by pupils might be of interest to anyone involved with helping children to choose reading material. You might be a parent looking for books to read with your kids or a teacher looking to kickstart reading for pleasure – there’s lots of reading food for thought here. Hopefully, these lists of favourite children’s books will provide some interesting ideas for what to read next.

We think these lists of books for young readers and early teen readers will be of interest to schools, parents, librarians and home educators. Use them to spark some conversations regarding the apparent disconnect between which books are loved by children and which books were enjoyed by parents (children’s books), and which books are being recommended and taught by schools (books for children). Listen to our children’s literature podcast for an introduction to this debate.

If you would like to join our next informal schools’ survey panel, take part in our podcast or become a book reviewer; please sign up for our monthly newsletter to receive updates and information. There’s a button link at the end of this page. Or, if you’d like to get in touch, our contact page is here; or see our podcast page to leave a voicemail message if you’d like your views to be featured in our next podcast episode.