Every year, another wave of apps, tablets and "smart" learning platforms arrives, each one promising the same thing: give your child this device, this programme, this subscription, and their attainment will rise. Reading will improve. Maths will click. Learning will finally be easy and fun.

It's a compelling pitch. But look beyond the marketing and at the actual evidence, and a very different picture emerges. In system after system, the more technology is used in place of direct teaching, the worse children's attainment tends to be, not better. And when that promise fails to deliver, it isn't the company that sold you the product who pays the price. It's your child.

The evidence does not match the marketing

The OECD's PISA study*, the largest international comparison of what 15-year-olds actually know and can do, has closely tracked this pattern. Published in December 2023, the study found that heavy use of digital devices in class is strongly linked to worse results, not better ones. Where pupils reported being distracted by other students using phones, tablets or laptops during maths lessons, their scores were measurably lower than pupils in classrooms without that distraction. Leisure use of devices for browsing, social media or games showed the same pattern: the more time spent, the bigger the drop in scores.

Perhaps most tellingly, the OECD's own director of education has pointed out that some of the world's highest-performing education systems, in East Asia in particular, have been notably cautious about bringing technology into the classroom, while countries that adopted it enthusiastically have not seen the gains they were promised. Sweden is a striking case: having been one of the first countries to swap textbooks for screens, it is now reversing that decision, because the data simply didn't back up the promise. Attention spans got shorter, and learning deteriorated.

Why the promise falls apart

It's worth understanding why this keeps happening, because the pattern isn't really about the technology itself; it's about what gets lost when technology stands in for a teacher.

Learning to read, spell, or solve a maths problem is not something a child absorbs by watching a screen. It's built through active, guided practice: trying something, getting it a little wrong, and having someone notice exactly where it went wrong and correct it there and then. A skilled teacher hears the sound a child mangles, sees the hesitation before an answer, and adjusts the next question accordingly. That minute-by-minute responsiveness is very hard for any app to replicate.

Instead, most learning apps can only judge whether a final answer is right or wrong. They can't easily tell whether a child worked it out properly or guessed, used a picture clue instead of sounding out a word, or memorised the pattern of a game rather than the skill it was meant to teach. A child can achieve "100% complete" on an app's dashboard while the actual skill underneath, the thing the parent is paying for, never really develops. The dashboard looks like progress. It often isn't.

I have seen the consequences of apps directly with two dyslexic pupils whose parents had them working through Nessy, a well-known dyslexia app, before I started teaching them. One had quietly worked out how to outsmart the programme, guessing his way through the exercises rather than actually decoding, and was still being marked as making progress. It was only because his mother happened to notice the mismatch between his app results and his real reading that it was caught before too much time had been lost. The other pupil didn't manage to learn the system, but the programme simply wasn't teaching him what he needed. Week after week of not really progressing didn't leave him neutral; it left him with a growing sense that he was bad at reading, on top of the reading difficulty itself. The app hadn't just failed to help; it had actively reinforced his sense of failure.

Learning is hard. Technology pretends it isn't.

There is a deeper problem underneath all of this, and it might be the most important one. Technology sells itself on making learning look easy: tap the right answer, get a star, watch a cheerful animation, move on. But learning to read, spell or solve a maths problem was never meant to be easy. It takes real effort and sustained concentration. It takes sitting with something you can't yet do and working at it until you can.

That struggle isn't a design flaw in learning. It's the whole point. The effort is where the skill actually gets built.

All children find learning hard, in exactly the same way adults find hard tasks at work hard. And just like adults, children would rather be doing almost anything else than grappling with something difficult. This is not a character flaw in your child; it's completely normal. The difference is what happens next. An adult who is supposed to be writing a report but picks up their phone and starts scrolling is doing exactly what a child does when a learning app offers a game, a badge, or a distraction dressed up as "engagement." Technology does not rescue children from this pull towards distraction; it hands them the single most effective distraction ever built, disguised as the lesson itself. How deceptive can you get?

A child who is never asked to sit with difficulty, never asked to concentrate through the boring, effortful part of learning something, does not get spared the hard parts of education. They just never build the ability to do them. Concentration and the willingness to keep working at something difficult are skills in their own right, and like any skill, they only develop through practice. A child who has spent their early years being kept "engaged" rather than being asked to concentrate will struggle badly when real learning, the kind that requires sitting still with a hard problem for ten uninterrupted minutes, is finally demanded of them.

This is really the whole secret of teaching a child well: not making hard things feel easy, but training a child to enjoy grappling with hard things and coming out the other side having succeeded. That feeling, of having worked hard at something genuinely difficult and got there, is what builds both the skill and the confidence to do it again. Technology that removes the struggle removes exactly the part that was doing the teaching.
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This is just as true in the home-school as it is in school.

Who pays for that gap?

This is the part that matters most, and the part the marketing conveniently leaves out.

When a shiny reading app or maths platform fails to deliver, the company that sold it doesn't lose out. The subscription has already been paid. The device has already been bought. The glowing reviews and the app store ranking are untouched. The people who wrote the advertising copy move on to promoting the next product.

The person left holding the consequences is the child. It is the child who reaches the next school year still unable to blend sounds into words properly, or still wobbly on times tables, because the hours spent on the app felt productive but weren't. It is the child whose real difficulty, perhaps something like dyslexia, went unnoticed for months because the software never distinguished between genuine decoding and clever guessing. Attainment does not quietly recover on its own. Gaps like this tend to widen, not close, the longer they go unaddressed, and the child is the one who has to make up the ground later, usually with more effort and more frustration than if it had been caught early.

This is why Reading Made Simple is not an online programme, and the child is never expected to work from the computer.
We have video lessons - created (unwillingly) to help parents see how to teach their child - but I expect the parent to work through the lesson beside their child. Better still — I hope the parent will watch the lesson and then use what they have learned to teach their child away from the computer.

If you really must use an app, don't leave your child alone with it.

None of this means every piece of technology is useless. Used carefully, as a support for skills a child has already been directly taught, some tools genuinely help with practice and repetition. The problem is treating technology as a replacement for teaching, rather than a minor supplement to it.

If an app is going to be used at all, it should never be handed over as a babysitter. An adult needs to sit with the child while they use it: watching what they're doing, listening to how they're doing it, and assessing whether real learning is actually happening underneath the screen. That's exactly what would have caught both of the situations with Nessy far sooner. An adult sitting alongside the child would have heard the guessing instead of the decoding, and noticed the lack of progress before it had time to become a lack of confidence. The app on its own could do neither. It took a parent or teacher, actually present and paying attention, to see what the software couldn't.

An app is never a replacement for parent, teacher and child interacting directly. It can, at most, sit alongside that interaction, with the adult still doing the real teaching: watching, listening, and assessing throughout, exactly as they would without the screen in the room at all.

What reliably raises attainment is still what it has always been: a knowledgeable adult who can watch a child work, hear exactly where they're struggling, and adjust the teaching in that moment. That kind of close, responsive attention is what closes gaps. A dashboard cannot do it. An app cannot do it. Only a person, paying proper attention to your particular child, can.

So before putting a screen in your child's hand, it is worth asking the question honestly: if this doesn't deliver what it promises, who actually pays for that? Not the company. Not the seller. Your child.

She explains it far better than me!

* OECD (2023), PISA 2022 Results (Volume I): The State of Learning and Equity in Education, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris.
Full report: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volume-i_53f23881-en.html

Some children pick up longer words easily. Others need more support. These steps work for any longer word, and you'll need to talk your child through them until it becomes automatic.

There are lots of complicated rules for splitting words into syllables. Still, even the "official" rules aren't consistent — teaching them just adds confusion, especially for young children or the older child with a special need.

So, true to our name, we keep it simple: it doesn't matter exactly where a syllable "should" split, as long as the child ends up saying the word correctly. A child can't work out the syllables properly until they've already read the word — so we don't ask them to.

As the parent/tutor, model these steps out loud every time a longer word comes up, so the child learns to copy you.

Here are some of the most common with suggested words to practice reading.

​If your child needs extra practice, I have put together a simple, ready-made resource to help you put this method into practice.

Get your pack now - only £1.50 - click the picture below!

• Multisyllabic Word Chunking Practice Book – 12 pages with practice words using common prefixes and suffixes, with large print for easy reading.

You can use the practice book alongside the method explained above, working through the words together until chunking longer words becomes more automatic.

 

Many people contact me because their child is struggling to read. Some wonder if their child is dyslexic and whether or not they should get a formal diagnosis. If this is you, I  hope this post gives you some direction.

Not every child who struggles to learn to read is dyslexic. Some simply need a more structured programme to learn with, and Reading Made Simple provides that structure. Others, though, seem to have more difficulties that parents need help to overcome.

I don't work from a tick list of typical dyslexic symptoms. I work from what I see happening as I teach, and over the years, I've noticed the same things coming up again and again. Some of my pupils arrive with a professional diagnosis already in hand. Others have none, but know a parent is dyslexic, or strongly suspect it, and recognise the same pattern showing up in their child. Either way, a label — or the lack of one — doesn't change what they need: help learning to read and spell.

• Many (not all) of my pupils were late talkers.
• A high proportion had trouble learning to blend their first CVC words.
  
• Many struggled to retain sight words, no matter how many times they met them.
• Once a word can be decoded, they still have to overlearn it many times before it becomes truly fluent — automatic reading doesn't come easily for these children.
• They confuse similar words — like/look, they/there, was/saw — and the list is long.
• They add words when reading, often without noticing they've done it. The brain is predicting rather than carefully decoding, and it cannot self-check for meaning. From the outside, it can look almost like fluency. It isn't.
• Fluency must be hard-won for these learners. 'Misreads' and 'confusion words' slow everything down.
• Vowels are a particular sticking point — some children manage at word level, but the extra processing time slows them down at text level, where it all has to happen fast enough to hold meaning.
• Spelling throws up letter reversals and missing sounds. Some sounds hide — 'n' and 'l' especially — and these children have to learn to feel where sounds are made in the mouth rather than just hear them.
• Many have a very short attention span- ten to fifteen minutes maximum to begin with.
• They all desperately want to learn to read - and past the age of 8 are likely to have become despondent.

None of this is a diagnosis, and I'm not qualified to give one — a list like this never can be, whoever it comes from. But whether a diagnosis exists already or not, this is what I have seen happen, lesson after lesson, year after year, with children who have struggled to learn to read.

• Struggling readers have gaps in their phonics learning. ​For some, those gaps seem strange. For example, one lad of 8 had been through 3 phonics programmes, one of which was specifically for dyslexic pupils. His mother was baffled - why was he struggling to read? After all, he knew all his sounds. On assessing, I discovered that all three programmes had gone too fast - this lad had never learned to blend three sounds to READ - oddly, he could do it to spell. The programme had dictated the pace - the boy had fallen through the cracks.
• These struggling readers need a tightly controlled decodable reading scheme, built on words they have actually studied — a programme with no curveballs to throw them off track, no words they haven't yet learnt to decode or spell. One twelve-year-old pupil with a reading age of 8 had never been given a book containing only words he could read. Having attempted to stumble his way through many readers, he had given up. Reading fluency seemed out of his reach. With the Reading Made Simple reading books, and along with tuition to fill his gaps, he is now a changed child.
• They need to feel safe: to feel that the programme understands the way they learn, and that success is within reach, not around every corner is another word they can't get. That feeling of success is by far the biggest motivator they have. Reading Made Simple provides such a programme — one that goes at the child's speed, not a book's, guided by a teacher who knows when to move on and when to hold back.
• They also need to use as many senses as they can. They need to feel the sounds with their mouth parts, not just hear them.
• They need a great deal of repetition — which can be boring without support, so it has to be varied: multisensory activities, short bursts, built-in success, not just the same worksheet over and over.
• And they need consistency: short, daily, targeted lessons, every weekday, no excuses barring sickness. Children who find it hard to retain things lose the flow after a day off, and end up going back to the start again and again.
  

​I could go on. But the thread running through all of it is the same: a processing system that works, but works slowly, and needs far more repetitions to consolidate than most people imagine. Once you understand that, the teaching approach becomes clearer.

For some children, the structure provided by Reading Made Simple is enough. Once someone actually shows the child how sounds and letters fit together, in an order that makes sense, without being rushed on to the next thing before the last one has settled, they pick it up quickly. For them, Reading Made Simple is often all it takes. The relief — for them and for their parents — is enormous.

For others — often the ones who arrive with a diagnosis, or a parent who has one — the list above is closer to what's happening. The blending is harder won. The words that "should" have stuck by now haven't. Reading looks fluent from across the room but falls apart the moment you listen closely — words swapped for words that look similar, extra words slipped in without the child noticing, meaning quietly slipping away underneath. Worse still, the child may be memorising the story and be 'reading' without really reading it, which again can look like reading. These children aren't failing to try. Their processing system works — it just works more slowly, and needs far more repetition than most methods ever give it credit for.

Either way, the starting point is the same: a properly controlled, decodable scheme, taught in a fixed order, with nothing left to guess. That's what Reading Made Simple gives you.

For the second group, it also needs to be paired with the kind of overlearning I described above — more intense tuition — and, often, with someone who can watch closely enough to notice where a child is quietly compensating rather than actually reading. For these children we run a support service with access to the very lessons and materials we use with our own pupils. This is worth many, many hours of work, so sadly we cannot give it away for free, but if you think your child may benefit from this kind of support, please contact us.
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You can try a sample of these resources below for FREE. We have two threads for our special needs support: Tom stories for those aged 7 and under and the Jack stories for those aged 8+. Both use the Level 1 teaching manual.

If your child has a persistent b and d reversal problem despite being taught the difference, you are not alone, and neither is your child. B and d reversal is one of the most common and most persistent problems in early literacy — and one of the most misunderstood. Parents try everything. Nothing sticks. The child keeps writing "bog" for "dog" and "dike" for "bike," and everyone gets frustrated.

This post explains why b and d reversal happens, why the usual approaches do not fix it, and what actually does.

Why b and d reversal happens
Your child is not being careless, and they are not failing to try. The problem is not that they do not know that b and d are different. They do. Ask them, and they will tell you. The problem is retrieval — when writing at speed, the brain cannot always pull up the right letter shape quickly enough. By the time the pencil is moving, the wrong shape is already on the page.

To understand why, it helps to know something about how the brain processes letters. The visual system is hardwired to recognise objects as the same regardless of which way they face. A chair is a chair whether you see it from the left or the right. This is useful for almost everything in life. It is a problem for reading, because b and d are the only objects in the world where facing direction is the entire point. They are identical shapes. Only the orientation tells you which is which.
Young children's brains have not yet learned to override this instinct for letters. That is why b and d reversal is completely normal up to the age of six or seven. The brain is simply doing what brains do.

In most children, repeated exposure to letters alongside their sounds gradually anchors each letter as a distinct symbol with its own identity. The brain learns that b and d are not the same object facing different ways — they are two completely different things. Once that anchoring is secure, the b and d reversal problem disappears.

If your child is just starting on their road to literacy, then there are things you can do to minimise future b/d troubles:
Keep trouble apart is the key phrase.

• Introduce the initial sounds at different times. Never practice them together on the same day, unless they are firmly linked to Bee says 'b' and Dee says 'd' with their capital letters alongside - as we do in the Reading Made Simple programme.
• Always link a child's first introduction to the letters with letter formation. Even if your child cannot write, they can trace. As they trace say: B: down the b-b-bat, and round the b-b-ball; D: Round like an 'AY' and up high and down. Do this every time the child writes any letter.
• Don't ask a child to decode a word with both letters (like bed/bad) until they are proficient at sounding out. This allows time for the brain to see them as separate identities before they are asked to process the difference at speed.

This is the way this reading programme helps all children have a good start to reading and spelling.

In some children — particularly those who find literacy harder than average — this anchoring process takes much longer. The letters have not yet become fully distinct symbols. Under the cognitive load of reading and writing, when attention is on meaning rather than letter shapes, the brain defaults back to treating them as interchangeable. The wrong one comes out.

This is not a vision problem. It is not laziness. It is the brain doing something entirely logical that happens to be wrong for these two specific letters.

When should you be concerned about b and d reversal
If you are here because your child has not learned correctly from the start and/or they are still having trouble:

• Occasional b and d reversal at five or six is completely normal. Most children self-correct as reading develops.
• Persistent b and d reversal at seven or eight, despite good phonics teaching, is worth addressing directly with a consistent approach.
• Still reversing at nine, ten, eleven with no improvement — this tells you the phonological anchoring has not completed as expected, and the child needs a reliable external support rather than more correction.

Is it dyslexia?
B and d reversal at any age is not by itself a sign of dyslexia. Some dyslexic children reverse heavily. Others do not reverse at all. The reversal is a symptom of incomplete letter anchoring — which is related to but not the same as dyslexia. Do not assume a child cannot be dyslexic because they do not reverse, and do not assume a child is dyslexic simply because they do.

Why the usual approaches to b and d reversal do not work
You have probably already tried some of these.

• The bed trick — writing the word bed so that b and d form the headboard and footboard. Many teachers recommend this. It is clever, and it works for some children. For others, it adds a complex processing that can cause mental overload. By the time the child has thought 'bed', identified which end is b and which is d, and translated that back to the letter they need, the moment has passed.
• The thumbs trick — making L shapes with both hands to show which way each letter faces. Same problem. Too many steps between the question and the answer.
• Repeated correction — telling the child they have it wrong and asking them to fix it. This feels like teaching. It is not. Every time the wrong letter is written — even if it is immediately corrected, even if it is rubbed out and rewritten — the wrong pathway gets practised. The brain does not distinguish between a corrected error and a correct attempt. It just practises what it produces.
• Asking the child to remember which way round the letter goes. This is the whole problem restated as a solution. They cannot reliably remember. That is why you are here.

All of these approaches to b and d reversal have the same flaw. They ask the child to retrieve the correct answer from memory under pressure. That is precisely what they cannot do reliably. A strategy that depends on the thing that is broken will not fix the thing that is broken.

What actually works for persistent b and d reversal
Remove the retrieval demand entirely.
A simple card with a picture for each letter with a sound cue — fixed permanently to the desk — means the child never has to retrieve the shape from memory at all. They glance at the card, they see the correct letter, and they write it. The cognitive load disappears, and the right letter is written.

This is not a new idea. Visual reference cards have been around for years. Letterland built an entire programme around the principle of embedding letter shapes in pictures precisely because the research shows it works. The reason these approaches often fail in practice is not that the idea is wrong. It is because nobody teaches teachers and parents how to use them properly.
Most times, b/d reversal is the teacher's problem. They notice the error, get the child to correct it, and the child gets frustrated. Just think how you would feel if your errors were constantly being pointed out to you.

What is the answer then?
The pupil is trained to take responsibility for the errors - to make the student the active agent in the correction process rather than the adult. ​
How can this happen?
We provide a letter cue card, train the child to use it, and then back off. No words, no correction, only initially silent pointing to the care as a reminder of its presence. The child will have been trained to know that when you point, they check before the read/write. In time, you will want to see the child checking for him/herself without any prompting.
When should it happen?
Every time the child reads or writes.
A card that appears occasionally, gets forgotten, sits in a drawer, or is consulted only after the error has already been made will not work. It will feel like another failed strategy to add to the list. The card only works when it is there every single time the child picks up a pencil, and when the child has been trained — deliberately and consistently — to check it before they write, not after.

If you are using Reading Made Simple with your child at home, you will already know that repetition is essential. Children who find spelling hard need to return to the same words and patterns many times before they stick. But repetition does not have to mean doing the same thing every time. For many children, especially those who find the work hard, variety in how they practise is what keeps them engaged enough to do it at all.

These ideas are not a script. They are a menu. Try something, watch how your child responds, and if it is not working, try something else. No activity works for every child, and what works one week may not work the next.

Sorting
Take the words from the current list and sort them into groups. You can sort by sound, by spelling pattern, or by any other link your child notices. The sorting itself is the practice — your child is looking at the words, thinking about how they work, and making decisions. That is worth more than copying them out.

Use physical cards your child can move around rather than writing the sort down. Keep it short — five to ten minutes.

For example, if you are studying the AR words, sort them by ending: ARD, ARK, ARM. Once the child has sorted the words on the list, see if they can think of any others that could be added to each group. Keep these words purely verbal at this stage.

Drawing
Before sorting or spelling a set of words, ask your child to draw one image for each spelling pattern that means that sound to them. Their choice, their drawing. Do not suggest images unless they are completely stuck.
For children who are artistic, drawing can become a real strength in their spelling work.

A word map takes this further. Write the target word in the centre of a blank page. Draw four branches:

• Say it — how to pronounce it, broken into syllables
• Tricky bit — the one thing to remember
• Draw it — their own sketch of the meaning
• Word family — one or two words that share the same pattern

Your child fills in the branches and draws the image themselves. One word map per session is enough. Done properly, it takes time, and that is fine.

Game formats
Change the format of the practice without changing the content. Some ideas:

• Odd one out — give three words; one does not belong to the pattern. Which one and why?
• Beat your own score — how many can they spell correctly in two minutes? Can they beat that next time? Their score against their own previous score, not anyone else's.
• You be the student — they test you. They read the word, you attempt the spelling, they correct you. Be sure to make seom errors typical of the errors your pupil makes (e.g. reverse b/d/ if that is a problem). Catching your errors is very motivating for most children, and they have to know the word well to do it.
• Signal before spelling — you say a word, they show which pattern it belongs to before attempting to spell it.

Physical variety
Write on a whiteboard or chalkboard if you have one. Writing large uses different muscle memory than writing small, and wiping it off removes some of the pressure of getting it wrong on paper.
Say the word aloud in syllables before writing it.
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A note on what these ideas cannot do
These activities work best when you watch how your child responds. If something is not working, stop. If your child is bored, try something else. If they are frustrated, the session is probably too long, or the words are too hard.

No list of activities replaces knowing your child.
What you are doing in these sessions is genuinely difficult.
Progress may be slow.
That does not mean the approach is wrong. 
Have patience.