Leavers' books for a nursery or reception class

Nursery and pre-school leavers moving up to reception, reception classes finishing their first school year, and Year 6 leaving primary. It works anywhere the same thing is true: a group of children leaving together, and a setting that wants to mark it with something better than a certificate.

The minimum is five children, so a small pre-school room is a perfectly ordinary order rather than a special case.

A hardcover works out at about $39.47 per child for a class of ten and $36.47 for thirty, with a single delivery charge for the whole parcel quoted to your address before you pay. Prices are charged in US dollars and your card does the conversion.

You choose who pays. Either the setting funds it - in which case it is a leaving gift from you - or each family buys their own child's book from the link you send, and the setting spends nothing at all. Most settings already run the second arrangement for school photographs, so parents need no explanation of it.

Paste the class list, choose a story, and send each parent a link. A parent adds one photograph from a phone in under a minute - no account, no app, nothing to install, and they see nothing about any other family.

Your class page shows who has responded, so the chasing in the final fortnight is four names rather than the whole register. If a family never replies you leave that child out and their book is refunded; the rest of the class still prints on time.

Work backwards from the last day. Printing and delivery is about six days to a UK address once you approve the class, and photograph collection realistically takes a fortnight because it depends on families rather than on you.

So send the links about a month out. A class started in the last week of term will not arrive in time, and we would rather say that here than take the order and disappoint a room full of four-year-olds.

Consent is captured twice. You confirm at the point of ordering that you hold each family's permission to use their child's photograph, and then every parent confirms it again themselves on their own upload page before they can send anything - so the record does not rest on your word alone.

The photograph is used to draw that child's illustrations and then deleted. It is never shown to another family and never appears on any page that can be found publicly. If your setting needs this in writing for a policy folder, our photo policy page is the document to print.