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Reading Fluency

Assess fluency in minutes.
Resource every lesson.
See the progress.Bring joy to reading.

The complete fluency tool. A quick, accurate assessment shows you where each child is. Then everything you need to take them further: the planning, resources and pedagogy. Carry them all the way to fluent comprehension and real enjoyment.

64
schools using it
+13
WCPM average this term
Run your first assessment freeWhy fluency matters

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FilmWatch Alfie’s Story
50 seconds
Alfie, a Year 3 boy, reading aloud

Watch the flywheel in action, 50 seconds.

“A full fluency assessment in 2 to 3 minutes per child. Less time assessing.
More time teaching.” Gareth McGovern, Assistant Headteacher

A story you’ll recognise

I want to tell you about a child. Not a dramatic one. An ordinary one, which is the whole point.

Alfie is in Year 3. He met the phonics check threshold at the end of Year 1, and Alfie can read, in the sense we usually mean it. Put a book in front of him and he’ll give it his best shot. He has secure decoding knowledge, a decent sight vocabulary. Nobody would call him a struggling reader.

But listen to him for a moment and you hear it. The effort he is exerting. He reads in little chunks, gets a run going, then trips on a word. Works hard to decode it, then gets going again. He’s working so hard at getting the words off the page that the reading never lifts. He doesn’t have the time or the cognitive space for expression.

Ask him about it afterwards and he might give you a character, maybe where they were. But what they did, why they did it, what might happen next? Gone. He was too busy reading to understand what he read.

This is Alfie.

And there are thousands of children like him.

That’s why we built ReadingFluency.

Welcome to the fluency flywheel.

Alfie doesn’t need more reading comprehension. He needs to stop pouring all his effort into getting the words off the page, so there’s something left over to understand them. That’s what fluency does, and the flywheel is how you build it.

Assess where a child’s fluency really sits. Teach with short, joyful poem lessons. Reassess to see how far they’ve moved, what they can do now and what still needs work. And once the wheels are turning, there’s no looking back.

The fluency flywheel: a painterly woodland vine wheel with four spokes and a gold flower at the centre, turning clockwise
Assess, teach, reassess, repeat. Round and round, gathering momentum.

Trusted by schools like yours

We’ve found Reading Fluency incredibly useful at Brambleside. It has helped us move beyond a broad sense of reading need and identify, with much greater precision, which pupils need support with fluency, pace and automaticity. The assessments are quick to use, easy to interpret and have given staff clear information to shape targeted intervention. Most importantly, it has helped us spot children who may be able to decode but are not yet reading with the fluency needed to fully access comprehension.
Natalie Goosey
Deputy Headteacher, Brambleside Primary School
Simon recognised a real problem for schools: the absence of simple, accurate reading fluency assessments. By creating this tool, he has provided a solution that enables schools to identify pupils’ needs precisely and act on them. It’s something every school should have.
Jamie Hallums
Educational Consultant, School Improvement Partner and former Headteacher

Step one

One assessment, three layers.

The quick check takes two minutes. The deeper layers are there when you want them. This demo works like the real thing, so tap through.

87 WCPM

Two minutes with a book. Not twenty with a spreadsheet.

The child reads an unpractised, year-group passage aloud for one minute. The tool counts the words, subtracts the stumbles and gives you words correct per minute, the measure of fluency that predicts comprehension better than almost anything else. Two to three minutes per child, start to finish, not the fifteen to twenty minutes a paper assessment takes, and a whole class fits inside a single lesson. No stopwatch, no tally chart, no working out.

Everything you need in one place

  • Automatic WPM, words correct per minute and accuracy, calculated live

  • Errors, omissions, self-corrections and additions, colour-coded

  • Curated, age-appropriate passages for Years 1 to 6

  • Professional reports in Excel and PDF for parents and school leaders

  • Every pupil’s assessment history in one place, by year group and class

  • Two to three minutes per child, start to finish

  • Optional comprehension questions and prosody ratings, for deeper data

Step two

Teach into the gap, with hear it, grow it, show it.

So you’ve found Alfie. The question every teacher asks next is the honest one: what do I actually do on Monday? This is the answer, and it’s the engine of the wheel. Repeated reading, the one thing the evidence keeps pointing to, shaped into a simple weekly routine around a poem worth reading.

It sounds like the dullest thing in the world. It isn’t. Do it with a poem worth performing and the children want the next go. They land the funny line, they hold the pause, they read it like they mean it, because now they do. One longer lesson to launch it, then a few minutes a day. It fits the week you already have.

One poem, one week

Hear it, grow it, show it. Tap a day to see the routine.

Hear it · day 1 · 30 to 40 min · whole class + partner talk

Perform

my turn

Read the entire poem aloud. Expression, pace, pause, drama. Children listen, eyes up.

Partner talk

your turn

What’s the poem about? What words don’t we know? Short and sharp.

Reader talk

my turn

Read again, children following. Make your choices explicit: “my voice went up here”. No more than three.

Partner talk

your turn

How would you read it? Fast or slow? Where would you pause? Which word is loudest?

Echo read

my turn · your turn

Read one line, fully expressed. Children echo it back. The expression, not just the words.

Download the full routine as a printable PDFStick it on the staffroom wall.

Our Poetry Teaching Tool

Repeated reading is the most evidence-backed route to fluency there is, and poetry makes the repetition something children actually want to do. Rhythm, rhyme and a reason to read it again. These are original poems, written for the classroom, not pulled from an anthology, with an interactive whiteboard view, printable resources and vocabulary support built around every one.

Full collections for years one to four, with years five and six coming soon.

We’ve gone deepest where it matters most first, the fluency years. The approach grows outward from there, with more on the way.

Step three

Reassess, and watch the wheel turn.

A few weeks on, you assess Alfie again. Same quick check, a couple of minutes with a book. Only this time you can see it: the words per minute up, the stumbles fewer, and the thing that doesn’t show on a graph, a child reading with a bit of expression where there was none.

62Autumn75Spring88Summer+13 a term

Words correct per minute, one child, three quick checks. The average gain across our schools this term: 13 WCPM.

This is the step almost everyone skips, and it’s the one that makes everything else work. Without it you’re hoping the teaching landed. With it you know. Assessment isn’t there to sit in a spreadsheet. It’s there to tell you what to do next. So you go again. A new poem, another week, another quick check. That’s how Alfie stops being a child who can read, and becomes a child who does.

Built on the science of reading

This tool helps you measure and track reading fluency, the critical bridge between decoding and comprehension. Developed by practising teachers and reading specialists, it follows evidence-based assessment protocols including timed readings, accuracy tracking and error analysis.

The dyslexia-friendly interface helps every child show their true reading ability, while detailed analytics help you find specific fluency barriers and target teaching where it matters most.

Secure and private

Designed around DfE data protection standards. Your data stays yours.

Curriculum-flexible

Works with any English curriculum

Evidence-based

Built on the science of reading

Built by British teachers. Supporting fluent, confident readers in primary schools.

Simon Sharp, headteacher and founder of ReadingFluency.co.uk

A word from me, before you decide anything.

I’m a serving headteacher, but English is my home ground. Before headship I was a literacy lead, and across four schools I’ve been the one who chose how to bring phonics in and make it work. I still believe in it. But I always felt the join between phonics and understanding was thinner than anyone admitted. Decoding gets a child to the words. It doesn’t carry them to the meaning. That longer journey is the part we leave too much to chance.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe. A child understands more when a text has been read aloud to them, when they’ve read it aloud themselves, and when they’ve learned to group words into phrases rather than trudging through one at a time. That’s what fluency teaches. More written comprehensions won’t build it. Reading, out loud, with expression and meaning, will.

One of my proudest moments this year was a class of Year 1s who spent a week on a single poem. By the end they performed it together, no help from me, and they held the pause before the last line so well that it properly landed. That’s the moment I’m chasing for every child. Not just accurate reading. Reading that means something to the child doing it.

So use the assessment on its own if that’s all you need. Plenty of schools do, running it every so often to keep an eye across a class. You’re under no obligation to go further. But if you feel the wheel start to turn, you’ll know what to do next.

Simon Sharp, Headteacher

The honest offer.

For 30 days you get the whole flywheel. Open, no gates. Run it with your own children, in your own classrooms, and see what it does.

Assess

The fluency assessment, to find the gap the phonics check missed.

Teach

The poetry collections and the hear it, grow it, show it routine.

Reassess

The quick re-check that shows you the movement, child by child.

Ready to find the children who need you most?

Start finding the children who can decode but cannot yet read with fluency. Your first assessment takes two to three minutes.

Run your first assessment free

No card required. Quick to set up. Cancel anytime.