Cost of a new reading scheme

[stickystick]

How much would it cost to buy a new reading scheme for a primary school? (1 form of entry, about 200 kids in all)

Upwards of £10000 but get a good deal from them!

Do you really want to buy a whole new scheme from the same publisher? Can you keep some of your existing books (ie are they phonic) and then supplement with new ones? I've always seen it as an advantage to have books from a variety of publishers as it exposes children to a far wider range of books and so is far more like "real" reading. Endless Biff & Chip is deadly for children and parents and above all for the staff who have to listen to them repeatedly.

A couple of years ago we decided to move away from ORT stages and put the books into coloured book bands. We took the opportunity to get rid of everything old, tatty, outdated and (at the bottom end) not fully phonic. We could then see really easily which colours we had 3 or 4 boxes for and which only had 1. I then bought lots of Collins Big Cat and Alphablocks books to fill in the gaps, along with some of the new ORT phonic non fiction books.

We had some RWI books in there as well. Doing it that way meant that we could spend a few hundred each year to replace lost/damaged/outdated books on a rolling programme, rather than suddenly being faced with replacing the whole scheme at once.

We also had books donated by parents ie some of the Biff & Chip books published by Marks and Spencers, Osborne phonic readers and other similar ones. I really liked the variety it gave the children to choose from.