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Covid-19 / Coronavirus update

Updated: July 4th, 2022. We are receiving and reading emails, mail and website messages; but we are not able to answer every message. We are currently not operating phone calls or using social media for messaging. Please use our contact form or email for all messages.

Book recommendations on this website link to Amazon.co.uk, UK Bookshop.org and Waterstones.  Amazon has a regularly updated information page regarding ordering and Waterstones has a COVID status page. We’ve not experienced any issues with orders to date.

Book reviews. We’re still accepting and receiving books for review from established contacts, but we’re not able to take on any new contacts at the moment. Also, we are now collecting mail every 48 hours, and we’re now forwarding copies to reviewers on a bi-weekly, not daily, basis.

To contact The School Reading List website, please use the form below.

Before you click send, please have a look at our answers to frequently asked questions.

Frequently Asked Questions and Answers

Can I copy your lists? No – and here’s why. We are happy for any school or organisation to link to our website and book list pages, but please don’t copy our book descriptions or other website content – this is a copyright issue. We write all our own reviews –  please respect our hard work! We are protected by Copyscape and Pixsy who alert us to any problems and infringement notice emails are generated and sent out automatically to websites and hosts.

In short, when our lists are copied, Google stops sending traffic to our site. If that is allowed to persist for any length of time, there would be no more SRL website, no more reviews, and no more lists! Please bear in mind that our site is viewable for free and without a subscription, so please play fair and don’t copy.

What you can use: we have video versions of our most popular lists on Vimeo and YouTube, and schools and educational organisations are welcome to use these video lists and embed them on school websites, and into online newsletters, remote learning platforms and emails.

Do you have printable versions of your lists? No, for two reasons. Firstly, we are committed to being a net-zero website. We use Cloudflare to reduce and track our carbon impact, we use an eco friendly webhost and we contribute to tree planting schemes to offset our website carbon footprint. All of our reading resources are 100% online – with no CO2 producing paper printables or photocopiables.

Secondly, we cannot offer downloadable text versions of our lists since search engine guidelines prohibit that. This situation exists for all websites in the publishing industry.

No. We operate with editorial control in the same manner as a magazine or newspaper. Teachers, librarians, and authors are welcome to approach us with ideas for op-ed pieces, reviews or features. However, any publication would be our editorial decision based on the merits of the article, and while we would provide a byline, we don’t offer links as payment, accept payment, or give payment for unsolicited proposals. We specifically reject ‘guest posts‘ due to the way search engines view them as spam and unnatural. Search engines really don’t like guest posts, so including them on our site could be damaging in the long term. You can read more about this debate in webmaster publications such as Search Engine Journal. We are committed to writing original content based on our own editorial decisions and recommending books and resources because of their usefulness and value to our readers. If that means we have fewer words on our site, so be it. We prefer to be genuine!

Yes, we’re happy to provide comments to genuine print and online media organisation, and offer our opinion or expertise regarding children’s books, primary and secondary English teaching, school libraries and literacy in the UK.

Yes, we are happy for bona fide book publishers, authors, illustrators, publicists, literary agents and print journalists to quote limited excerpts of our reviews for marketing and editorial purposes, in print or online.

We look at all suggestions and add books that have excellent feedback from young readers and teachers. We consider books that have been published by both established publishing houses and self-published titles. Please check our Covid notice at the top of this page for our current position regarding review copies, otherwise do contact us if you have a book you would like us to consider. Please note, due to the volume of books we receive each term, we cannot review every book that is sent to us, and we do not have sufficient staff to be able to answer every email. We do try to provide a review on Goodreads for books that we don’t feature on this site. Also, we can only feature books that are widely available from physical bookshops and popular online outlets.

The books selected on our year group lists have been picked because we’ve seen repeated and consistent feedback from a range of different school settings around the UK to indicate that children enjoy them, that children can relate to them, that children can empathise with the characters and settings, and that educators find them useful for literacy and English teaching. When we place a book on a year group list we are effectively saying to schools – across all regions of the UK – that we think this is a book that would work well in a school library, classroom library or for group reading. School budgets are often limited, and sets of books can cost a lot of money, so we take great care to pick titles that have a wide appeal and a high volume of positive feedback. For more focussed interests and specific genres, please see our topic book lists.

For topic book lists, we’re looking for a collection of titles that represent a cross-curricular topic area across the primary (and sometimes early secondary) age ranges. This might be a specific area such as ‘dinosaurs’, a subject with clear curriculum links, such as ‘the weather’, a hard to fill shelf for the school library, such as ‘Hobbies – 790.13’, or a collection of books that can be boxed and used as a mobile resource in a school, such as “The Vikings“.

We receive advanced review copies from publishers and publicists, we read relevant trade magazines, we keep an eye out for new titles in publisher’s catalogues, we receive solicited and sometimes unsolicited production copies of books from authors and we track viral threads relating to children’s literature on social media.

Yes, we’ve added functionality to allow bulk orders, ordering complete lists and overseas orders. If you need books for your school, a birthday or Christmas presents. Our bulk buy page makes it easy to order complete sets of reading lists & multiple copies for class sets.

Yes, this is possible by using the features on our bulk orders page.

Yes, there are full details on our bulk orders page, under the heading “Can I order children’s books in bulk and pay by invoice?“

Yes, on our international orders page we’ve selected a collection of our most popular books and lists; and on our bulk order page we have links to all our books and lists for overseas ordering.

Yes, we do. Our newsletter sends out around two emails per month detailing our books of the month and books that have recently been added to our lists. You can sign up to our newsletter for free.

Currently the two most popular books from our lists are War Horse by Michael Morpurgo and Who Let the Gods Out by Maz Evans. Our most popular list is our 100 picture books for EYFS collection.

You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.

Yes, we run a sister site – K-12 School Reading List – that curates lists for US grade schools, our editor runs a wide-ranging series of topic book lists, and  – from time to time – we help promote innovative and interesting educational startups that we think deserve a wider audience.

Yes we do. We have an extensive range of books available on uk.bookshop.org, an organisation that gives “a matching 10% to independent bookshops” on each sale, “75% of profit margin to stores, publications (and) authors” and offers a facility for you, the purchaser, to “find a specific local bookshop to support”. There are more details on the UK Bookshop site.

Yes. We’re looking for experienced present and former UK based teachers, school librarians or children’s authors to join our band of book reviewers. Get in touch if you would like to find out more. Please note that we are not able to offer or receive payment for reviews.

We are not taking on any display, agency, targeted or social advertising on this website at the current time. It is our policy not to use Ad Networks, in line with our commitment to not storing or tracking personal data.

We are committed to not storing any personal user data or tracking data, so at this time, we don’t run competitions of our own through this website. However, we do recommend carefully vetted competitions run by trusted third parties on our competition pages. We look to attract new parents, teachers and schools to our recommendations, and for that reason, we don’t run giveaways, blog tours, or sweepstakes on this website or social media. Contrary to popular belief, extensive research has demonstrated that these marketing practices (which often require extensive storage of personal and demographic data, and can lead to problematic compliance issues on social platforms) don’t in fact reach new users or increase meaningful engagement. We prefer to use our time to create new and useful content. From time to time we donate advance review copies of books to schools.

We have a visual sitemap of every page on the School Reading List website, you can search for articles on our search page, there’s also a timeline of every post, and a historical chronology of how the site has developed is available in a calendar format that can be followed for updates. Updates can also be provided by signing up for our monthly newsletter.

Yes. Click the following link to leave us a voicemail via Skype, if you would like to ask a question for one of our listener’s message slots, leave a shout-out or be featured in a future episode.

Yes. We don’t offer printable resources, and all our online content is served from Cloudflare, which is committed to zero emissions, and hosted by Eco Web Hosting which uses carbon offset planting, eco-friendly green technology powered by 100% green energy, and green business practices. Eco Web Hosting plants trees each month and contributes to gold standard projects as part of our hosting package. SRL also contributes to tree planting schemes to offset our office carbon footprint.

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In the meantime, do have a look at these pages on our website which might offer assistance.