School sends home one or two decodable books a week; an enthusiastic new reader can eat those by Tuesday. Buying the full school scheme costs hundreds — and is usually unnecessary. Here's the cheap-to-expensive ladder, and how to make sure anything you get actually matches your child's level.
The single best free resource is Oxford Owl's free eBook library — hundreds of decodable readers (including Read Write Inc and Oxford Reading Tree titles), free with a parent account, filterable by age and programme. If your school uses Little Wandle, the scheme's own parent pages have pronunciation videos worth ten minutes of any parent's time — knowing that m is "mmm" not "muh" makes home practice match school exactly. Your local library is the other free goldmine: most UK libraries stock banded reading-scheme books, and librarians know their bands.
Publishers sell home versions of school readers in small, affordable packs: Collins' Big Cat for Little Wandle sets, OUP's Read Write Inc Book Bag Books and Songbirds (decodable stories by Julia Donaldson that read like actual stories), Usborne's early phonics readers, and Phonic Books' Dandelion series — the catch-up specialist's favourite, and brilliant for children who need lots of practice at one level before moving on.
First, match the system, not the age — "ages 4–5" on a cover tells you nothing; look for the phase, set or colour and translate it into your school's language. Second, err easy — a decodable book your child reads with 95% success builds fluency and confidence; one that's 70% builds bedtime arguments. Third, check it's actually decodable — genuine decodables state which sounds they use; a book that just says "phonics" on the cover may be a normal book wearing a lab coat.
Decodables are practice equipment, not literature — they exist so your child can apply the sounds they know, and the occasional plot about a cat sitting on things is the price of that. The love of reading comes from the other pile: the picture books and chapter books you read to them, with no levels, bands or phases anywhere in sight. Keep both piles going and the ladder climbs itself.
Compiled August 2026. Links go straight to publishers and free libraries — no affiliate links, no sponsorship. Not educational advice.