Year 5 and 6 reading list: what 424 primary schools in England recommend

Published September 2026 · Updated October 2026 with 424 schools · Research by The KidsBooks.io team

We analysed the Year 5 and Year 6 reading lists that 424 primary schools in England publish on their websites and found around 5,000 different books. Only one is on more than half of the lists: Holes by Louis Sachar (1998), on 251 of the 424. The books schools agree on are mostly old: 20 of the 30 most-listed titles were first published before 2000, and only three from 2015 onwards.

This is the second edition. Our first, in September 2026, covered 36 schools; we have now added 388 more from every region of England.

The 30 books schools recommend most for Year 5 and 6

If you are looking for a Year 6 or Year 5 reading list, these are the books that schools themselves recommend most often. They are ranked by how many of the 424 schools list each book; a school counts once even if the book is on both its Year 5 and its Year 6 list. Books with the same count share a rank.

Some lists name a whole series rather than a single book, for example “Alex Rider series”. We counted these as the first book in the series. The number of schools that named only the series was: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (97 of its 158), Stormbreaker (37), The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (35), Northern Lights (26), Artemis Fowl (11), Wolf Brother (8), Once (6), The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (4) and Cogheart (3). Counting only the schools that name it as a single book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone would fall well outside the top 30.

Key findings

One book comes close to a shared canon; the rest is a small common core. Holes is the only book on more than half of the lists (59%). After it, Skellig reaches 45% and Clockwork 44%. The 424 schools name around 5,000 different books between them, and about half of those appear on just one school’s list. Only 15 books are on a third or more of the lists. No school includes all 30 books in the table; the most any one school includes is 28, and 11 schools include none of them.

The books schools agree on are old. Of the 30 books in the table, 20 were first published before 2000, and half were published in 1996 or earlier. The oldest is Black Beauty (1877). Only three are from 2015 onwards: Cogheart (2016), The Girl of Ink & Stars (2016) and Who Let the Gods Out? (2017). Among the 100 most-listed books, 59 were first published before 2000 and 13 in 2015 or later.

Year 5 and Year 6 lists lean towards different books. Some are clearly treated as Year 6 reads: Skellig is on 43% of the 345 Year 6 lists but only 7% of the 328 Year 5 lists, and Goodnight Mister Tom (37% against 6%), The Hobbit (38% against 7%), Carrie’s War (34% against 5%) and Mortal Engines (28% against 2%) lean the same way. Others sit in Year 5: Dragon Rider is on 27% of Year 5 lists and 2% of Year 6 lists, followed by The Wind in the Willows (23% against 3%), Aquila (20% against 1%) and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (35% against 12%).

Newer lists recommend newer books. 177 schools have a list dated 2023 or later. On those lists, 9 of the 33 most-listed books were first published in 2015 or later, and The Boy at the Back of the Class (2018) is fifth. On the lists of the 69 schools whose newest list is dated before 2020, none of the 31 most-listed books is that recent.

Michael Morpurgo is the most-listed author; Louis Sachar reaches as many schools with far fewer books. Morpurgo has more than 70 different books across the lists, over 1,000 school listings in all, at 294 of the 424 schools. Louis Sachar is on the lists of 284 schools with 11 books, Philip Pullman on 273 and Malorie Blackman on 234. Of the 30 books in the table, 17 are by women and 13 by men.

A handful of newer books have broken through. The most-listed books first published from 2015 onwards are Cogheart (127 schools), The Girl of Ink & Stars (119), Who Let the Gods Out? (117), The Boy at the Back of the Class (109) and Letters from the Lighthouse (98).

Schools vs the experts

In our first edition we compared school lists with four widely used expert lists: Pie Corbett’s Reading Spine for Years 5 and 6, BookTrust’s best books for ages 9 to 11, the School Reading List’s Year 5 and Year 6 lists and The Reader Teacher’s Top 100 lists for Year 5 and Year 6.

Two of the four expert lists are far more up to date than the schools. 62% of the books on The Reader Teacher’s lists and 61% of those on the School Reading List were first published in 2015 or later, compared with 3 of the 30 books schools list most. BookTrust’s selection (24%) sits in between, and none of the books in Pie Corbett’s spine that we could date was published after 2013.

Where the experts agree, schools mostly follow. The Hobbit, the only book on all four expert lists, is on 160 school lists (38%). The Boy at the Back of the Class (2018), on three of the four, is on 109 (26%), just outside the top 30. The newest expert favourites have further to go: The Final Year (2023) is on 35 school lists, Skandar and the Unicorn Thief (2022) on 11 and October, October (2020) on 10.

How we did this

What we collected. In September and October 2026 we looked for recommended reading lists and reading spines for Year 5, Year 6 or both on primary school websites, found through web searches and by going through the websites of schools in the Department for Education’s register of schools, region by region. We included 424 primary schools whose lists we could read in full: 738 lists in all (328 for Year 5, 345 for Year 6 and 65 covering both years). All 424 schools are in England, in all nine English regions: South East 84, North West 60, East of England 52, London 50, West Midlands 42, Yorkshire and the Humber 41, South West 40, East Midlands 34 and North East 21. Nearly all are state schools; at least eight are independent.

Dates. We dated each list from the date on the document, in its web address or in the file’s own details. 177 schools have a list dated 2023 or later, 125 from 2020 to 2022 and 69 before 2020; 53 schools’ lists are undated. In the first edition we left out lists dated before 2023. This time we kept every list a school still publishes, because an older file can still be a school’s current list, and the checks below show what changes if only recent lists are counted.

What we left out. We skipped pages that only link to other organisations’ lists and lists copied wholesale from one outside source, such as a bookseller’s or a blogger’s list. That includes 18 lists copied from one widely shared blog list of 100 books for Years 5 and 6, which removed 17 schools from the sample. Within the lists we used, we left out single poems, extracts, information sheets and entries too vague to identify one book.

How we counted.

• Titles and authors were standardised, so “Goodnight Mr Tom” and “Goodnight Mister Tom” count as one book, and clear author mistakes on the lists were corrected.
• Where a list names a whole series, we counted the first book in the series; where we could not be sure which book that is, we left the entry out.
• Each school counts once per book. Percentages are of the 424 schools.
• The lists do not give publication dates. We added first-publication years ourselves for the 100 most-listed books (we could date 99 of them) and for the newer books named on this page.
• Author gender is reported only for the books in the table, where it is publicly known.

Checks. 68 schools, in 22 groups, publish lists that are near-copies of each other (at least 80% of the books in common both ways); the largest group is 29 schools sharing one list. If each group is counted once, Holes is still first (210 of 369, 57%) and 26 of the 30 books stay in the top 30: Treasure Island, There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom, Black Beauty and The Borrowers drop out, and The Boy at the Back of the Class, Letters from the Lighthouse, The London Eye Mystery and Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief come in. Using only the 177 schools with a list dated 2023 or later, Holes (99 schools) and Wonder (91) are first and second, and 22 of the 30 books stay in the top 30.

Limitations. This is not a random sample: we can only count schools that publish a list online that we could read in full. A list on a school website is a recommendation, not a record of what children read or are taught in class. Some lists are long documents that have been handed down over the years; others are short, carefully chosen class spines, and both count equally here. We copied the titles from web pages and PDFs and checked the most-listed books by hand, but a few entries may still have been misread. The results describe these 424 schools only; they are not an estimate for all schools in England or the rest of the UK.

The full dataset, with every school, list, book and source link, is free to download: year-5-6-reading-lists-england-2026-424-schools.csv (30,172 rows, with each title as written on the list and as we standardised it). Please credit KidsBooks.io if you use it. The first edition’s data (36 schools) is still available: year-5-6-reading-lists-england-2026.csv.

How to use this list at home

• Start with your child’s own school: if it publishes a reading list, that comes first, and this table can fill the gaps.
• Treat it as a menu, not a checklist. No school in our sample lists all 30 of these books.
• Mix old and new. Pair one of the older classics with a recent title from the table, such as Cogheart or Who Let the Gods Out?
• Check the themes first. Several of the most-listed books deal with war, illness or loss, among them Goodnight Mister Tom, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit and Pig-Heart Boy.
• Share the older ones. Books such as Treasure Island and The Secret Garden can be easier to enjoy read aloud together.
• Want shorter reads to sit alongside these? See our picks of good books for 10 year olds and books for 11 year olds.

Pairing class reading with wellbeing lessons? Our SEL books for grades 3–6 guide matches ten short chapter books to the five social-emotional learning skills.

kidsbooks.io publishes the Lena series of illustrated chapter books for ages 8 to 14; our own books are not part of this data.