A keepsake instead of a yearbook, at yearbook prices

It holds the whole group. Everyone is in it, the staff are in it, and in ten years it is the only object that proves who was in that room. A personalised book cannot do that, and any page that pretends otherwise is selling you something.

It carries signatures. Children write in the back of each other's copies and that scribble is half the point. If the signing ceremony is the moment your families look forward to, keep the yearbook - we would rather tell you that than take the order.

It is one file. You lay it out once and print thirty identical copies, which is genuinely less work than thirty of anything.

Most children appear two or three times in it, and one child appears on the cover. Ask any parent which page they turned to first and they will name the one their own child is on - and then say there were only two.

It is a record, not a story. A four-year-old cannot read a yearbook. They can be read a story in which they are the person who does the brave thing, and at that age that is a different kind of object entirely.

It goes on a shelf in a house where nobody opens it, because the thing that makes a book get opened again is a child recognising themselves in it.

Printed school yearbooks run roughly $30 to $120 per student depending on page count and print run, and a printed preschool yearbook usually lands around $35. That is the number your families are already used to paying once a year.

A class book here is a hardcover, twelve illustrated chapters, one per child, at $39.47 each for a class of ten and $36.47 for a class of thirty, plus one delivery charge for the whole parcel. It sits inside the range you are already asking families for, not above it.

And it does not have to come out of your budget at all. You choose at the start whether the setting pays for the class or whether each family buys their own child's book from the link you send them. Under the second option your setting spends nothing and takes no risk.

The honest weakness of this format is that it depends on parents. A yearbook prints whether or not a family engages; a personalised book needs one photograph from each home. In a class of thirty you will chase four or five of them.

So the whole thing is built around that. Your class page shows you exactly who has sent a photo and who has not, so you are chasing four names rather than wondering about twenty-seven. You can re-send a link, and you can leave a child out entirely at the end - if a family never responds, that child's book is refunded to whoever paid for it when you send the rest to print.

It means a class order cannot be stranded by one unresponsive parent, which was the first thing every teacher we described this to asked about.

Several settings will want the yearbook for the group record and this for the leaving year, and that is not us losing half a sale - the two objects do different jobs. The yearbook is the class remembering itself; this is one child being told they were the hero of it.

If you are choosing between them for a single year, the useful question is not which is better but which one a five-year-old will ask to have read to them again.