How we level our books — and what SRL is not

10 July 2026 · Sidr Productions

Every Sidr title carries a Sidr Reading Level from 1 to 10, and every title is assessed against three strands rather than one number. This post explains the model; the reading levels page carries the full ladder and the mapping tables.

Why a tree

Most levelling systems measure decoding, because decoding is the thing that is easy to measure. A child who can decode every word of a book and take nothing from it has still not read it. And a child reading Islamic literature is doing a third thing as well — meeting character, adab and the moral weight of a story.

So we assess three strands:

• Roots — Faith & Character. The values in the text, the scripture quoted, what the child is being asked to notice about how a person behaves.
• Trunk — Word Recognition. Decoding, sight vocabulary, sentence length and structure. The mechanical load.
• Branches — Meaning & Comprehension. Inference, sequencing, holding a thread across pages, answering a question the book does not answer for you.

Fruit — skilled, willing, independent reading — is what the three strands grow into. It is deliberately not a fourth thing to assess.

What it maps to

SRL 1–10 is mapped to Oxford Reading Tree stages, UK book-band colours and Lexile ranges, so a school does not have to abandon the scheme it already runs. The mapping is a guide for placement, not an equivalence claim.

What we do not claim

The SRL is publisher-developed. It has not been externally validated, it is not a phonics scheme, and it is not a substitute for a teacher’s own assessment of a child in front of them. We say this in the toolkits, on the mapping grids and here, in the same words, because a level that oversells itself is worse than no level at all.

See the full ladder →

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Published 10 July 2026 in Publishing. Questions? Get in touch.