That Reading Thing (TRT) and That Spelling Thing (TST) come out of everything I’ve been doing since leaving high school in Canada many years ago: earned a degree in English language, trained as an English teacher, was involved in youth work and taught English as an additional language at an adult education centre. I moved to the UK with my family to do more youth work and met young people around my own kitchen table who didn’t read well enough to thrive in education.

My curiosity about teaching teens to read led me to the work of Professor Diane McGuinness who coined the term ‘linguistic phonics’, now also known as 'speech to print phonics' or 'structured linguistic literacy'.

It also led me to a secondary school for boys with emotional and behavioural difficulties where, even if you’ve got a reading age of seven, you don’t want a reading lesson created for seven-year-olds. That was the start of That Reading Thing and my journey to creating the most effective tools possible for helping discouraged older students.