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Recommended Reading
I never miss out the scale exercises in tutor books and I've tried a couple of other scale practice books before but this one really is in a different league.
There's one book covering grades 1-3 and another for grades 4-5. I started using them a month or so ago and have used them with all my flute students (apart from the very early beginners) regardless of whether or not they're taking grade exams. As soon as you have a range of low D to middle D, you'll start finding the grade 1-3 book useful.
In the grade 1-3 book there are exercises for just one octave of the scale (for those who haven't reached all the higher notes yet) and another set using both octaves. Taking it one key at a time, Harris gives the student a few different ways of familiarizing themselves with the note patterns: working out the notes of the scale & arpeggio; thinking through the scale & arpeggio; a technical exercise; a melodic, expressive exercise and composition exercises. For minor keys, there are exercises in both harmonic and melodic forms. One of my students had only ever played harmonic scales and couldn't 'hear' her way around the melodic form at all. One week of melodic exercises later and she could sing the form and had cracked her first melodic scale. Each book is introduced with some helpful advice on getting the most out of the book and has a list of helpful tips for practicing and performing scales and at the end there are the scales written out for the relevant grades.
Taught well, these exercises can really help give the student a sense of the key itself and it's unique character. They can encourage students to play scales 'musically' and they demonstrate scales and arpeggios in a melodic context.
Given how useful the material for each key is, it's disappointing that there are no chromatic exercises in either book or anything for the dominant and diminished sevenths when they appear at grades 4-5. If you want C major material you'll need the second book since the Associated Board exam syllabus, which these books follow (I haven't checked the other boards) doesn't introduce C major until grade 4 (strange but true). It's also a real shame Harris hasn't written a book for grades 6-8 but if you look at his list of publications you'll see he's a very busy man!
