Book bands explained: what the colours mean

Book bands are the colours lots of primary schools in England put on reading books to show how hard they are. They start at Lilac, then run through Pink, Red and Yellow and on to Lime and beyond. The colour describes the book, not your child’s ability.

What is a book band, exactly?

Think of book banding as one shared ruler for books from many reading schemes. A school can mix publishers on one shelf and still match books of the same difficulty. The Book Banding system has 19 bands, numbered 0 to 18, but schools mostly call them by their colours.

A book gets its band from its text: the number of sentences per page, the number of pages and how complex the sentences are. Banding also weighs how familiar the words are, and whether the subject is something your child knows already, such as a fairy tale, or something new.

What order do the colours go in?

This table follows the Oxford Reading Tree levels, which match the general book band colours. The school years show a typical class: a rough guide, never a target for your own child.

Book band	Oxford level	School year	Age
Lilac	1	Nursery	3-4
Pink	1+	Reception	4-5
Red	2	Reception	4-5
Yellow	3	Reception	4-5
Light Blue	4	Reception, Year 1	4-6
Green	5	Year 1	5-6
Orange	6	Year 1	5-6
Turquoise	7	Years 1-2	5-6
Purple and Brown	8	Years 2-3	6-7
Gold and Brown	9	Years 2-3	6-8
White and Brown	10	Years 2-3	6-8
Lime and Brown	11	Years 2-3	6-8
Lime+ and Grey	12	Years 2-3	6-8
Grey	13-14	Years 3-4	7-9
Dark Blue	15-16	Years 4-5	8-10
Dark Red	17-20	Years 5-6	9-11

Oxford pairs Brown with Purple to Lime, while some school charts make Brown its own band after Lime, before Grey. Higher up, charts differ too: one may end with Burgundy and Black, while Collins counts up to Pearl. Follow whichever chart your school gives you.

What does each band expect from your child?

Lilac is about getting comfortable with books. Some Lilac books have no words at all: your child tells the story from the pictures while you talk about it, perhaps curled up at bedtime.

Pink to Yellow covers the first books your child reads on their own. Pink uses simple phonics for short words like sat and pin. On Red they start working out new words in short, plain sentences, with a bit of help from you. By Yellow they can handle letter pairs such as ee, oa, ch and th.

Light Blue to Turquoise is where the pace picks up. Your child decodes words quickly and learns that one sound can be spelt in different ways. Around Orange you may notice them fixing their own mistakes without a prompt, and by Turquoise most children read aloud quite fluently.

Purple to Lime builds confidence and stamina. Your child knows most common tricky words and reads most words without stopping. Texts get longer, and punctuation starts to shape how your child reads aloud.

Why doesn’t my child’s school use colours?

If your child’s school in England teaches a validated phonics programme, the first reading books may not carry book band colours at all. Government guidance, the Reading Framework (2021, updated 2023), explains why. Early readers should take home books that use only the sounds they’ve already learned. Colour bands that mix schemes with a different order of sounds, or that rely on guessing from pictures, are best avoided.

So the book in your child’s bag may show a phonics set or phase instead of a colour, until they’ve worked through the programme’s decodable books. If it seems too easy, that’s usually on purpose: your child should be able to read every word.

Read Write Inc storybooks are colour coded too, in a different order: Red Ditty, Green, Purple, Pink, Orange, Yellow, Blue and Grey. On Read Write Inc Pink, your child has already finished Green and Purple, so they are further along than a child on book band Pink.

When does a child move up a band?

There’s no fixed time for each band. The teacher listens to your child read and often waits until both decoding and understanding feel secure. So your child may read every word smoothly yet stay on a colour a while longer. Some schools call this consolidation, and it’s perfectly normal.

Treat the colours as a guide rather than a race, and resist comparing at the school gate. Talk to the class teacher about what your child is working on if:

• the book feels like a struggle every evening
• your child seems unhappy about reading
• the band hasn’t changed for a long time

The teacher or the school’s SENCo can arrange extra support, and your child doesn’t need a diagnosis to get it.

How can you use book bands at home?

Let your child read the school book several times over. The first go at the kitchen table is for working out the words; later reads are for reading smoothly, with some expression. Keep reading aloud to your child too, from books well above their band, because that’s how they meet new words and longer stories.

Away from school, a band is a handy way to pick books your child can manage alone. On Fabliko you set your child’s book band in their profile and get stories at that level, with your child as the hero. How it works shows the three steps.

FAQ

Which book band is typical in Year 1?

Oxford’s table puts Year 1 at roughly Light Blue to Turquoise. Children move at different speeds, though, and a school on a phonics programme may use its own labels in Year 1. Your child’s teacher can tell you where they are.

What does dual-banded mean?

A dual-banded book shows two bands on its cover. It’s meant for an older child reading below their age: the subject suits their age, the text suits their reading level.

Do Read Write Inc colours match book bands?

No. Read Write Inc colours follow the order in which its programme teaches sounds. Its Pink says nothing about book band Pink.

Sources

• Oxford Owl: Oxford Reading Tree levels and book bands
• Collins: Making sense of book bands
• Department for Education: The reading framework
• Oxford Owl: Read Write Inc. Phonics guide for parents
• Gaddesden Row JMI School: A parents’ guide to book bands
• British Dyslexia Association: Is my child dyslexic? Diagnosis