The UKLA are inviting teachers from within travelling distance of Liverpool to judge the UKLA 2025 Book Awards.

Sponsored by LoveReading4Kids and Reading Cloud, the UKLA Book Awards are the only national children's book awards judged by teachers.  The Awards seek to celebrate children’s books in order to:

  • encourage teachers to increase their professional and personal knowledge of recently published high quality children’s books
  • promote the place of books for young people in all educational settings from nursery to key stage 4.

The books selected for the award will be titles that teachers can share with pupils as part of regular classroom experience, eg to:

  • read for pleasure in the teacher’s read aloud programme to the whole class
  • inspire extended response from learners (through discussion, creative interaction or understanding the wider curriculum)
  • be the focus of study (set books, shared and guided reading)
  • enhance all aspects of literacy learning and literary study

Selection committees and teacher judges are asked to look, first and foremost, for well-written, engaging ‘reads’ and, where appropriate, outstanding illustration and design.

Judges will be required to travel to Liverpool for a launch meeting and for a shortlisting meeting. To register your interest in becoming a judge please click here 

Applications are also open for the UKLA Our Class Loves this Book Award.

Sponsored by Prue Goodwin, this prestigious UKLA Award celebrates a class’ response (led by their teacher) to one of the books shortlisted for the UKLA Book Awards.

This award encourages teachers to explore a book in detail, by not only looking at the author and the text, but also immersing their classes into worlds of possibility thinking. Teachers may decide to use their chosen book as part of a theme they are teaching with their children, it could be an author study, or maybe a one off exploration – the choice is theirs!

The response can be presented in any way, e.g. through information technology, dance, art, drama, writing, music, spoken presentation or any combination of these.

The winning teachers (and their authors) are invited to the UKLA International Conference as guests of the Association, honoured at the awards ceremony and invited to present a seminar at the conference. UKLA also hopes to arrange an author visit to the winning schools.

Full details and submission guidelines can be found here 

And finally, submissions are open for UKLA Literacy School of the Year 2024. Sponsored by Hays Education, this award celebrates the practices and ethos of schools in which literacy thrives.

UKLA members can nominate a school which they believe to be worthy of the award and independent assessors will visit the school in question to see their practice in action.

Criteria have been formulated which reflect the wealth of international research into and experience of good literacy practices.

Full details,including the criteria and to the submission form can be find here. 

The winning school is invited to the UKLA International Conference in July as guests of the association.

Conference details can be found here.

Take a look at the longlisted titles for the 2024 Awards here, the teacher judges have done an incredible job!

@UKLA

#UKLABookAwards