School book clubs

How to run a school book club

By Tom Tolkien. This page was last updated on October 31st, 2023.

School book clubs – primary school book clubs can help to engender and establish a reading for pleasure culture across all age groups of your school. Secondary school book clubs can reignite that passion for reading that has perhaps waned since the transition from year 6 and help to widen pupils reading interests beyond books and into graphic novels, magazines, internet research and audiobooks.

Running a book club is also recommended in The Reading Framework guidance for teachers, published by the Department for Education. Our guide below provides all the material you need as a teacher or leader to set up, fund and maintain a book club as part of your school’s reading framework.

Here is our guide to running successful and popular primary school book clubs and secondary school book clubs – with monthly suggestions regarding book choices.

Primary school book club Secondary school book club Monthly school book club recommendations

To achieve the maximum benefit from a school books club – in terms of engendering a reading for pleasure culture and promoting books – the book club needs to be a long term project, and for that reason, it needs to be manageable and sustainable.

• Staffing – who will supervise your school book club – will this be a teacher, a librarian, another member of school staff, or an approved school visitor?
• Encourage pupil voice – where appropriate, allow your students to lead the book club, make decisions, pick material to read and decide on the format for discussion.
• Encourage your students to develop a format for each session, with agreed ground rules for participation and discussion and a commitment to listening to everyone’s views.
• Teachers – consider leading and modelling the discussion for the first few sessions. This might involve your library staff, other teachers, or older/former students to add insight and impetus.
• Source your resources in advance. What will you need to make the club sustainable? Consider any pens, paper, post-its, or mylar book covers that you might need.
• Create a buzz for your book club. This might be creating posters, video trailers for your school network, presentations in assembly, notices for form tutors to read out, or a book club flash mob during lunchtime or at registration. Possibly.

How to target and appeal to your book club members

While many book clubs work well with a breadth of different types of children joining in, some book clubs will benefit from targeting specific groups within your school. There are many reasons why you might want to target particular children – for example, to access funding, to provide evidence for your long term school development plan, to raise awareness, to increase enthusiasm amongst students who are disinterested, or to improve cohesion between key stages or different age groups. The following points are worth considering.

• Open or selective – will your book club be open to all, or by invitation? Open clubs need careful planning to ensure numbers don’t get out of control and resources get stretched, and also to ensure everyone’s interests are catered for. Selective groups are better for targeting particular pupils – for example for interventions – but might develop a stigma that leads to a long term lack of enthusiasm.
• Reluctant readers – book clubs are a great way to encourage children who are not yet enthusiastic about reading, but it’s crucial to ensure activities and selected books are consistently high interest, varied and fun. It’s worth looking at a wide range of books, including new children’s book titles, graphic novels, nonfiction, magazines and newspapers
• Improving reading – smaller reading groups are ideal to target students and encourage enthusiasm for and improvement in reading.
• Reading for pleasure – larger-scale book clubs are the perfect way to solidify a reading for pleasure ethos in both primary and secondary schools. Utilize your school book club members to help spread some reading for pleasure enthusiasm around your school.
• Encouraging pupils’ use of the library – reading clubs can introduce children to the wonders of not just the school library, but local and national public libraries.
• Reading buddies – if you are thinking about, or already have, a reading buddy scheme, utilising this in your book club is a great way to promote dialogue between different age ages, and inspire younger readers.

Who will run your reading club?

• Teachers.
• Teaching assistants.
• School librarians.
• Pupils – including reading ambassadors or pupil librarians.
• Are you able to ask for assistance from your MAT, LEA, local library service, parents, governors, or another school’s ‘reading champion’?

How to fund your book club

• How will you finance books, and how many books should you buy?
• Literature themed cake sales and bake-offs.
• Sponsored reading challenges.
• Organise book fairs, and use the commission to pay for new books.
• Use supermarket book vouchers, if available.
• Sponsored dress-ups or non-uniform days, dressed as book club characters.
• If money is tight, read the books aloud (one book required), or share books.
• Think about making books a joint purchase with other school departments – for example, a set of six books to share between the book club and SEN for targeted reading. Or a set of eight topic-based books to share with humanities or science. Join up with an after school or before school club to use their time and resources.
• Lead the school when it comes to developing World Book Day (and other literary days) fundraisers.
• Run an annual book quiz for your school and the wider community. Perhaps involve parents and your PTA in the running of your school book club.

Creating a great book club atmosphere

• Think about fun and engaging seating including bean bags and rugs.
• Use a room with suitable tables. Are you able to arrange the room so pupils can read in a circle?
• Posters. Many book publishers and marketing outlets will be happy to send unused book posters, bookmarks, postcards and other goodies.
• Consider when to timetable your club. Run the club when children will be able to attend without missing out on something else. Pick a time that won’t interfere with the all-popular football club, clash with awkward lunchtimes or ignite the wrath of that inflexible senior leader who delights in interfering with the smooth running of your school.

How to maintain interest in your reading group

• Extend your book club – podcasts, reviews, writing to authors,
• Make movie-style trailers for book club books using iMovie, PowerPoint or windows movie maker. Put these on your school website or social media to generate interest.

How to pick titles for your group of readers

• Pick themes that will appeal to those attending your club.
• Try to marry genres to tie in with curriculum links – without appearing contrived or academic to the pupils.
• Books for discussion – pick books that will provoke talk, inspire awesome ideas and further reading, and invite questions about people, places and the world your children live in.
• Pupil choice – always give the final say in book decisions to the pupils.
• Local authors – are there any author visits planned by your school, school library or English department? Can these visits tie in with your school book club? Perhaps your club members could interview or write questions to send to the visiting author?
• Online book clubs through Zoom and Teams are effective, but require lots of forward planning. Think in terms of one term in advance to ensure these run smoothly.
• Follow popular children’s and YA book blogs for ideas.

How to run a primary school book club

• Holding a competition to create a name for your book club is a great way to kick things off and get the whole school involved.
• Create a ‘Bookflix’ or top reads display in your classrooms or in prominent school corridors.
• Related activities – creating artwork, posters, acting out scenes from the books as mini playscripts, charades or presentations for school, house or class assemblies will help to promote your club to the wider school body.

Suggested themes for your KS2 book club

• Look at the books you already have available to you. Can you collate enough copies or titles to run a session on ‘mysteries’, or ‘amazing non-fiction’, ‘cracking classics’ or ‘fiery dragons’, for example?
• Focus on issues that develop in your school. For example, if your school is focussing on ethos – for example,  kindness and caring for others – looking at these themes in literature will resonate. Similarly, if children are worried about bullying, transition, or not fitting in, looking at the myriad of books that explore these themes will help engage and inspire your readers. Liaise with your PHSCE coordinator for advice and insight.
• Consider audiobooks. Not only are these appealing to less able readers, and great for sessions after stressful sats, endless swimming galas or exhausting residential trips, but they will allow you to explore a more advanced text.
• Books that are set in the woods, the countryside, or in the outdoors are a great excuse to hold your book club outside on a playing field in a forest school.
• Holiday ideas – as well as more traditional reading challenges, can your school book club members find children’s stories set in their vacation locations? Here’s a list of children’s literature and travel locations to spark some interest.
• Is there a children’s literature festival near your school? Or near where your pupils live during the holidays? Here’s a list of UK children’s book festivals all around the country.

Primary school book club – suggested questions to ask

• What do you know now that you didn’t before reading this book?
• How did this book make you feel at the end?
• If you could only tell people about one moment in this book, what would it be?
• Which character would you most like to be in this book? Why?
• How would you persuade the headteacher/deputy head/PE teacher to read this book? What would you tell them about it?
• Have you read any other book like this? How did it compare? Or was the book completely original and like nothing you’ve read before?
• If the book has child characters, what kind of people do you think they would be as grown-ups?
• Were you convinced by the story? Did it feel real?
• If one of the characters could turn up at your school – as a new child or a teacher – which character would you pick and why?

How to run a secondary school book club

Select books that provoke discussion. In particular, stories and non-fiction that invite the reader to have an opinion – either about a character, a setting, plot developments or an ending; or whether to believe the ‘truth’ or reliability of a narrative, argument, or what is presented as fact. These forms of discussion will encourage critical reading and critical thinking. Arguments in book clubs are helpful, not just to appreciate different points of view, but in helping to build the skills of analysis, appreciation and forming a hypothesis.

These skills will transfer into students’ writing – especially when answering exam questions with precision, insight, original thought and evidence.

How to maintain interest in your secondary school teen book club

Remember, it’s not just books – try to discuss newspapers, magazines, graphic novels, books that have been adapted into films or tv series, books that are popular on TikTok, and consider authors with ties to your local area.

Following social media awareness days and weeks, and tying this to specific book titles, can be a useful way to keep your club book choices relevant and interesting to your students. There’s also the added benefit that other events and causes running in your school, or local and national happenings that your pupils are involved with, might neatly dovetail with your book club. We’ve tried to include relevant events in each of our monthly book club picks.

Secondary school book club discussion questions to consider

• What do we think of the writing style? Does it work with the story matter and the characters? Why?
• How did this book make you feel after reading it?
• What did you think of the structure of this plot? Consider the use of in media res, dual narratives, flashbacks, sequencing, and mixed settings.
• Did the narrative perspective work for you? Would you have preferred 3rd or 1st person? Was the narrator reliable?
• Could you work out the ending before you reached it? Why?
• What part of this novel lingers in your memory?
• Was there anything about this book that irritated you?
• What life lessons did you take from the characters? Are there any situations moving forward where you think ‘I’ll do what that character did…’
• If your life depended on persuading someone to read this book – how would you pitch it?
• If you had to persuade a totalitarian regime not to burn every copy of this book, what would you say?
• What did you think of the author? Are they TikTok material or Instagram worthy? Was the title #NookTwitter threadtastic, Facebook viral, worthy of million Reddit upticks or was it Substack and highbrow?
• Imagine one of the book’s characters is sitting next to you at lunch in school. What would you say to them?
• Can you envisage a sequel? What would you like to see?
• Did this book change you in any way?

Secondary school book club themes to consider

• Banned books – there’s nothing better than provocative discussion.
• Monthly book recommendations – keeping up to date with the latest literature and non-fiction.
• Books with film and TV tie-ins – accessing and comparing different mediums can make your book club more accessible and appealing to reluctant readers.
• Prize-winning books – in particular following the awards shortlists and ‘shadowing’ the judging process. The Carnegie Medal award has a longstanding shadowing process that students can become involved with.
• Picking a particular children’s book publisher, and taking in a sample of their books.
• Other-worldly books – including science fiction utopias, fantasy lands and dystopian nightmares. Sometimes we just want to get away from the lives we live. If you need a creative writing link, try rewriting humdrum school life into the off-kilter worlds of ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’, ‘Ender’s World’ or ‘Never Let Me Go’.
• Biographies – are not just inspirational, but full of life lessons, hacks and potential shortcuts to success and ripe for critical discussion.
• Food books – either cookbooks or lip-smacking fiction – discussing these often marries well with a fund-raising cook-off and cake sales to raise funds for more books. What are the ingredients for the perfect read in your school?

Monthly book subscription for children and school book clubs

Our recommendations are available to buy through UK Bookshop Org, an organisation that supports local independent bookshops. We use this firm because we’ve received good feedback from our readers and school book clubs in the UK who have ordered from them. They’re able to source multiple copies of books quickly at good price points with clearly marked discounts and fast delivery.

Monthly school book club recommendations

You can subscribe to our monthly book club recommendations for free by signing up for our newsletter. Unlike many other monthly children’s book subscription services, there’s no cost to receiving our teacher-recommended, hand-picked, age-appropriate titles. Our service is obligation free. You can pick and choose which titles to buy and how many copies to order for your children or your primary or secondary reading club.

Have fun creating a great bank of books for your reading groups or building a great library for your children at home. We aim to select a range of exciting, diverse, inclusive and thought-provoking titles to inspire young readers each month.