You may sometimes want individual students to receive a shorter homework than the rest of their class, for example if they're catching up after absence.

The student's SRP target will be half of what the rest of the class receives. For example, if the class homework target is 300 SRP, a student on half-length will receive a target of 150 SRP.

If you don't want a student to receive compulsory homework, for example because they are experiencing difficulties at home, they're poorly, or they have a special education need that makes compulsory homework difficult or stressful for them, you can set them to always receive optional-only homework

The student retains access to Sparx Reader and their books, but there is no expectation to complete work. Their homework data will be excluded from weekly leaderboard compulsory completion data.

If you feel the automatic level assigned to a student isn't suitable, you can manually override their Sparx Reading Level:

We want students to give the book a good go before they choose to change it. This is to help encourage resilience amongst our readers and to expose them to books that they might not normally choose but could end up loving.

If students only ever choose to read books on specific themes that they are already emotionally engaged with, then they could miss out on accessing the full benefits of reading such as exposure to new vocabulary and broadening their cultural capital. It is also important to note that students will need to access a range of texts across the curriculum and reading a range of books helps prepare them for this.

Once the student has tried the book and if they are still not enjoying it, they can choose something else to read instead.

They can swap a book after they have read two sections.

They can swap a book by rating it as 2 stars or less or 'Much too easy' or 'Much too difficult', after reading the first two sections and passing the checks.

Students will also be able to swap their book if they are struggling. If a student is unable to pass the checks, once they have gone through 6 checks unsuccessfully, they will be asked if they would like to swap the book for something else.

Manually lowering a student's level will result in books being automatically swapped out if they are considered too difficult for the student. The student will then be presented with a choice of books at their new level, but will also be able to continue their previous book if they wish (see below).

By going to the reading history for a student, and selecting the book they are struggling with, you can use the Swap or remove book option. This will allow you to select the swap book button, and select a reason.

Currently you can only change individual students to Optional. For whole classes, you can set the homework plan's target to 0 SRP instead.

Yes - this means that if a student has swapped their book by accident or wants to restart their swapped book they can. They just need to go to their library and click 'choose a new book' and then select one from the 'swapped books' list. This will re-add the book to their library. They'll only be able to do this if they've got fewer than 2 books active, so if they've started new books since swapping they might have to swap one of their current books first.