Supporting Student Reading Success Through Assessment

by Jacinda Vaughan | Aug 2, 2025 | Australia, Blog, UK, USA

The Sounds-Write Progress Checks are carefully designed to align closely with your daily phonics instruction. Far from being just another test, these checks are devised to feel like a natural extension of your Sounds-Write lessons, putting teaching and meaningful data...

MTSS vs. RtI: What’s the Difference—and Why It Matters

by Tita Beaven | Jul 29, 2025 | Blog, Interventions, SEND, Symposium

At this year’s Sounds-Write Symposium, Mandy Nayton, CEO of DSF in Western Australia, delivered a keynote that brought clarity to a question many educators grapple with: What’s the difference between MTSS and RtI—and does it really matter? Spoiler alert: Yes, it does....

Flexible, Faithful, and Neurodiversity-Affirming: Supporting Students with Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) in Literacy Intervention

by Tita Beaven | Jul 18, 2025 | Australia, SEND

Inspired by the 2025 Sounds-Write Symposium presentation by Jacqui Edwards and Di Van der Walt Introduction Students with complex profiles of neurodivergence often present unique challenges—and opportunities—in the classroom. One such profile is Pathological Demand...

From Sound to Sentence: Supporting the 2025 Writing Framework Through Phonics and Spelling

by Tita Beaven | Jul 10, 2025 | Blog, Primary Education, Secondary School, UK

The newly-published Writing Framework (2025) and the Reading Framework (2023) together offer schools a clear, research-informed direction: secure the foundations of reading and writing early, and build on them progressively throughout primary education. They emphasise...

What Nursery Practitioners Need to Know About Phonics

by Caroline Hardisty | Jul 8, 2025 | Australia, Early years, Nursery, Pre K, UK, USA

Laying the Foundations for Reading Through a Speech-to-Print Approach In nursery settings, practitioners do much more than help children socialise and play—they lay the crucial foundations for their future reading success. One of the most important things early years...

Dyslexia: Diagnosis, Debate, and What Really Matters for Teachers

by Tita Beaven | Jun 25, 2025 | Blog, Interventions, News, SEND

This blog post was inspired by Professor Joe Elliott’s keynote: “Rethinking Dyslexia: From Diagnostic Labels to Evidence-Based Reading Support” at the Sounds-Write Symposium 2025. His thought-provoking presentation challenged many of the assumptions we often make...