Radical Simplicity
Intellectual Equity
True literacy improvement does not come from tiered worksheets or relentless comprehension drills. It comes from giving every pupil direct access to rich, demanding texts through deliberate, high-impact classroom craft. Grounded in cognitive science and four decades of classroom experience, our pedagogy and literacy programmes equip teachers to unlock ambitious literature, build reading fluency, and spark purposeful dialogue—all while protecting staff workload.
Flexible Delivery Options for Schools & Trusts
-
Whole-School INSETs & Keynotes: A practical, engaging whole-staff launch establishing consistent reading routines across every classroom.
-
Departmental & Phase Twilight Sessions: Targeted workshops helping primary phases or secondary subject teams apply vocal levers and dialogic reading to their specific schemes of work.
-
Curriculum & Literacy Consultancy: Direct advisory work with senior leaders and English/Literacy leads to integrate The Ambitious Years and reading aloud into your School Improvement Plan.
The Ambitious Years: Raising Curriculum Expectations
Working alongside Mary Myatt on The Ambitious Years, we collaborate with schools and multi-academy trusts to transform curriculum planning into an intellectual powerhouse.
Rather than diluting complex content or lowering expectations for struggling decoders, this work focuses on depth before pace. We help subject leaders and teachers design coherent, demanding curricula where every pupil encounters rich background knowledge, academic vocabulary, and profound concepts supported by the right instructional scaffolding.
The 'Read Aloud' Professional Development Programme
Based on the core frameworks from Reading Aloud in Every Classroom (co-authored with Simon Day), this practical training moves reading aloud from an informal classroom routine into an explicit, school-wide pedagogical driver.
When teachers deliberately carry the decoding burden with their own voice, pupil working memory is liberated. Struggling decoders can access high-tier vocabulary and challenging literature at their true intellectual level, closing the gap between reading ability and cognitive potential.
What the Training Delivers
-
The Four Vocal Levers: Training staff to deliberately command pace, pause, pitch, and projection to model prosody and shape how text sounds inside pupils' minds.
-
Shared Reading to Collaborative Dialogue: Moving beyond passive listening by embedding structured dialogic routines that lead directly into higher-quality written responses.
-
Replacing Low-Value Prep: Eliminating time-consuming differentiated worksheets in favour of high-leverage, whole-class reading routines that reduce planning burnout.
-
Cross-Phase & Disciplinary Application: Providing primary teachers with robust fluency tools and secondary subject specialists with the disciplinary literacy methods needed to navigate complex subject texts.