On the 5th December, I had the absolute joy of attending the Education Today Awards, joining hundreds of educators and organisations to celebrate the year’s achievements. When Sounds-Write was announced as the winner of the Corporate Social Responsibility award, I felt incredibly proud—proud of our team, proud of our community, and proud of the mission that has guided us from the very beginning.
At Sounds-Write, everything starts with a simple but powerful belief: every child deserves the chance to learn to read and write. It’s the reason we get up in the morning. Our mission, to improve the life chances of children by ensuring they become proficient readers and writers, runs through every decision we make. I’m lucky to work alongside a team who live and breathe that mission with genuine passion.
Charitable giving, volunteering, and the provision of free resources have always been part of who we are, even if we haven’t always talked about it loudly. Winning this award feels like the right moment to share more openly with our community about what social responsibility means to us, and how you, our practitioners, families, and schools, make it possible.
Our evidence-based phonics programme is now used by thousands of educators across the world and is especially impactful in schools facing high levels of deprivation. But our commitment goes far beyond training and materials. As part of our regular giving initiatives, we have supported high-impact organisations providing literacy and business training for women in Uganda, planted thousands of trees, and contributed to education programmes for vulnerable children. These causes were selected with input from our practitioner community, and it has been a privilege to champion them together.
Since 2021, we have provided…
We are, of course, a business, but we have never believed that literacy should be gated by what a school or family can afford. Providing equitable access to high-quality phonics resources has always felt essential to our mission. Since 2017, our free online course for parents and carers has supported more than 50,000 users worldwide, empowering families to guide early reading at home. We also offer over 50 free decodable texts on our website, resources we know make a real difference for schools and learners with limited budgets.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when education was turned upside down, we launched a free global online literacy conference that brought together 13,000 educators and parents. The follow-up events in 2023 and 2025 continued this commitment to free, research-informed professional development. Our 2025 conference focused on supporting learners with dyslexia, EAL backgrounds, and neurodivergent profiles—students who are too often left behind, and who deserve the very best support we can offer.
We also continue to provide training and resources free of charge to a number of under-resourced schools around the world. It has been incredibly inspiring to see how deeply committed educators, often working with very limited funds, can transform literacy outcomes when given the right tools and training.
Within our own organisation, we work hard to model the values we champion. We’re proud to offer a supportive workplace with strong benefits, flexible working, and a culture that prioritises wellbeing. And we take our environmental responsibilities seriously too: we print locally, our books and packaging are fully recyclable, and in the UK we partner with a printer accredited with the Carbon Footprint Standard to reduce our impact even further.
The purpose of sharing all this isn’t to boast. It’s simply to open a small window into the ethos that drives our work every day. We believe that organisations, particularly those in education, have a responsibility to lead by example, to invest in communities, to support access to learning, and to consider the wider impact they can have.
Thank you for being part of this journey with us. Everything we do is strengthened by the passion, generosity, and hard work of the Sounds-Write community. This award belongs to all of us.
