School don't send home books any more

Ofsted?

Perhaps that’s not affordable

It is the schools fault - what did schools do before technology?
Why change scheme if they knew they couldn’t afford the accompanying resources?

I am so saddened by this because for many children these physical books would be the only ones they would have at home.

It’s to do with OFSTED

This isn't the schools fault.

Couldn’t agree more. A sorry state of affairs

Ouch, what a shame! Ours sends their reading book for the week and a selected ‘challenge book’ which gets replaced as soon as we note that it’s finished in their reading log. Sometimes that’s every day

sure the school will have old reading scheme books. Maybe you can ask that they include a proper book as well once a week..?

Get a tablet for your child.
Also, make books and reading books a big thing in your house. Weekly buying, reading, discussing.

As a secondary teacher I find this so sad. We constantly battle to get teens off their phones/devices. We got rid of our online homework and started setting booklet/ worksheet based homework to try and get pupils to focus more without the temptation to go on TikTok or Snapchat while looking at their homework app. It’s so sad that such young ones will have to read from a screen - I totally get it though. Budgets have been slashed. We can barely afford to restock our school library. We’ve had to ask staff and parents for donations and second hand books.

I have about 80 phonics books at home, picked most of them up on Facebook marketplace for £25. Ebay has lots too.

We’re a book house though, DD has a huge floor to ceiling bookcase to rival the library and I pick up free/very cheap all the time.

Homework in primary is optional not mandatory.

If secondary schools require specific equipment for work to be completed on, they will need to provide it as not everyone can afford to buy it especially if they have more child at the school.

Are you sure? Our library has loads. I know at least one library where the phonics books are in a different place to the picture/ story books so it might be worth double checking.

There are almost none at our library either. The "reading books" section is only really suitable for fluent readers at the end of year 1. The few beginner books are mainly old look & say style series - for some reason there are always a lot of the very poor quality reading champions series, which relies on heavy (boring) repetition of key words and cues in pictures to encourage a child to a) memorise whole words and b) guess the text based on looking at pictures.

Isn't primary homework optional? Can you just say no and join the local library to practise together?

Incidentally the Apple awarded private school near here doesn't teach on iPads until year 3.

My local library doesn't have a huge collection of children's books but they have a big collection across the county which you can order in from. At some libraries there is a charge which can make this prohibitively expensive, but in my county it's free so worth checking this out if you haven't already.

Yep, it was a horrendous waste in many schools but the government mandated schools must choose from a list of a handful of phonics schemes and for many schools that meant buying the books to go with them.

Yes it’s not ideal at all but really what do you expect with the current budgets? I assume your kids get sent a general reading book home that you can read together? Schools are barely surviving paying their teachers let alone additional reading books to send home.
They spend thousands on a scheme of books (and most often not enough for one of each stage etc for each child). Those books often don’t get returned, are damaged, go missing. They don’t have any extra money to replace them. My kid’s school does the same and I would also prefer a reading book sent home but I understand why this isn’t feasible. We read the book on the iPad. But I have also bought the set of the phonic Songbird books above for £10 on FB. You could approach the school but don’t expect any changes.

Are you sure? Our library has loads. I know at least one library where the phonics books are in a different place to the picture/ story books so it might be worth double checking.

I wasn't taught to read through phonics in the 1950s.
Needless to say I'm not a fan of phonics as spelling correctly still has to be taught 🤔

I didn’t do it in the end but also was looking at badger learning as from what I remember it’s like a rental scheme where you pay a subscription and they send you a selection of banded books that you send back and swap. There will be other similar services if the library isn’t great. I’d also say, the school shouldn’t be just ignoring all the old books, they could still send them home alongside the phonics scheme online ones.

Mines at secondary now but it makes me sad that some kids don’t get reading books. They may not have any at home.

I would recommend getting the complete set of songbirds phonics for home. I think they’re much better stories than most of the school books we’ve had and my children made much more progress with them. Usborne first readers are nice to have but I think they jump up very quickly in difficulty.

My eldest had the online subscription during Covid and it was rubbish really. She didn’t mind doing it because there was some sort of treehouse to build if you collected points through answering comprehension questions but it takes away from sitting cuddled up and reading. I tried it for a week and then hit Amazon.