Help using this site

We are trying to make our website as accessible as we can. We hope that it meets your needs and that you find the information you are looking for. 

1. When to login to the BookTrust website

Most users of the BookTrust website do not need to login to the site to be able to view everything that is on offer. The login functionality of the site is there for practitioners who have signed up to one of our programmes. These include:

The reason we ask practitioners who are signed up to these programmes to login is so that we can show them some additional content which is only available for people signed up to the programme. All other content is available to everyone.

If you would like to find out more about how to sign up to the programmes, please visit the pages directly from the links above.

If you would like to be kept up-to-date with all the latest news and information from BookTrust, please sign up to one of our newsletters. 

2. Commenting on the BookTrust website

Here at BookTrust, there’s nothing we like more than a good old discussion about books. So, you’ll see that some of our pages have a comments section at the bottom, and we’d love to hear your views. However, this is a family friendly space, and we have some rules to make sure everyone feels at home. All posts will be pre-moderated, which means someone from the BookTrust team will read all comments before publishing them, so please do remember our guidelines before you hit reply.

  1. Please be nice. We’re a friendly bunch here and we’re discussing people’s views on different books and related topics. Please do not swear or use any racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, disablist language or SHOUT by using capital letters. If you feel angry or annoyed, step away from your screen and take time to consider your response. If you post multiple inappropriate posts, you will be blocked from commenting in the future.
  2. Please be safe – once comments are published, they will be live for everyone to see and can be indexed by Google and other search engines. So please don’t post any form of personal information which you wouldn’t want to be completely public.
  3. Please do not self promote your own books. We are not able to review self published books, and similarly if you post about, and link to, your work it will not be published.
  4. Think about how you can be misunderstood – tone is often difficult to interpret on the screen, so try to be clear when you type.
  5. We will not tolerate any form of abuse on the BookTrust website: any abusive comments will not be published and you will be blocked from using the site in future.
  6. If you're leaving a book review on the site, please make sure it is constructive. Our book reviews are intended to champion great stories and books that will get children reading. We will only publish book reviews about the quality of the book in question.

3. Help with reading and understanding the content of our website

We aim to use plain English language throughout our website and hope that we have made everything easy to read and to understand. If you have any feedback you would like to share with us about reading and understanding the content of our website we would like to hear from you. Please email us at [email protected]

Some pages for the site are in Welsh, where possible they are direct translations of what is stated in English. If you would like to read the Welsh language pages, look out for an orange button on the top right hand corner of the page with the word "Cymraeg" on it. By clicking that you will see the page in Welsh. To get back to the English version, the button at the top will now have the word "English" instead. Click on this and the page will go back to English.

4. Broken links and error messages

We try to ensure that all links on our site are up-to-date. If you do find a broken link or an error message, we would like to hear from you. Please email any broken links to [email protected]

5. Keeping children safe online

Please note that the BookTrust website sometimes links to third party sites, including YouTube, so children should not use the site unsupervised.

You can find out more about parental control settings on YouTube here.

6. Reviewing books

We are afraid that it’s our policy not to review books that are either self-published, independently published in a situation where the owner of the publishing company is also the only author published by that company, or not widely available in a variety of bookshops, websites and library wholesalers in the UK. When we say commercially published, we mean published and printed via UK commercial publishers of children’s books such as Quarto, Puffin, Hachette, Little Tiger, Lantana, Tiny Owl etc.

As we are recommending books to parents, teachers and librarians, we need to ensure that books are readily available for them to find in shops and in libraries. Additionally, commercially published books are worked on by editors, designers and illustrators as well as authors to ensure that their quality and suitability for children is of a very high standard. With the great numbers of commercially published books for children published every year, we find that we do not have capacity to consider self-published ones too.