About ReadingFluency.co.uk

I'm Simon Sharp, Headteacher at Fetcham Village Infant School in Surrey.

Eighteen months ago, we were celebrating a major win - we'd improved our phonics check scores to 83%. This past June another win: 94% of our Year 1 children passed the phonics screening check.

Our systematic phonics teaching was working. The data proved it.

But we noticed something odd. Children who'd passed phonics screening brilliantly - solid decoders, knew their GPCs - were getting stuck on the higher-level phonics books.

Not because they couldn't decode the words but because they couldn't read quickly enough to make sense of longer, more complex sentences.

Their decoding was perfect. Their fluency wasn't.

Jamie Hallums, our School Learning Improvement Partner, helped us see what was really happening.

Jamie introduced us to the concept of reading fluency assessment and teaching as a distinct, measurable skill that sits between phonics and comprehension.

Not just "can they read the words?" but "how are they reading them?"

• Are they reading in phrases or word-by-word?
• Is their pace appropriate for meaning-making?
• Do they self-correct errors automatically?
• Is there any prosody (expression)?

Jamie helped us understand that fluency is the bridge - and we'd been so focused on building strong foundations (phonics) and reaching the destination (comprehension) that we'd forgotten to build the bridge itself.

It explained everything about why certain children were stuck.

I'm fortunate to work with an incredible team at Fetcham Village Infant School.

Sophie Birrell, our Reading and Phonics Lead, helped me understand what fluency assessment needed to look like in practice. Sophie's expertise in early reading was crucial in ensuring our approach was developmentally appropriate and teacher-friendly.

Gareth McGovern, our Assistant Head and Year 2 Lead, worked tirelessly with Sophie developing teaching strategies and techniques to improve children's reading fluency. Along with Emma Wright, our Deputy Head and Assessment Lead, they helped pilot our first fluency tracking systems. Their feedback on what actually works in a busy classroom shaped every decision.

Together we developed a simple, systematic approach:

• 2-3 minute assessments per child
• Real-time marking of errors, omissions and self-corrections
• Automatic calculation of reading speed (WPM)
• Clear intervention pathways based on fluency patterns

It worked. Our teachers saved hours. Our data is getting better (we're still on the journey!). Our interventions became more targeted.

Most importantly: children are becoming less stuck.

After implementing fluency assessment at Fetcham, something became clear:

Every school faces the same problem. Very few were solving it.

Schools across the UK are celebrating phonics success (rightly so - it's essential).

But then watching children stall on harder texts, not because of decoding but because of fluency.

Most schools don't have:

• Time to build assessment systems from scratch
• Expertise to know what fluency markers to track
• Technical capability to automate the data collection

So I built ReadingFluency.co.uk.

Not as a tech entrepreneur (I'm definitely not that).

As a Headteacher who needed a solution - and wanted to share it with colleagues facing the same challenges.

ReadingFluency.co.uk is designed by teachers for teachers.

Every feature exists because a teacher said: "I need this" or "This is taking too long."

The tool handles:

• Quick fluency assessments (2-3 minutes per child)
• Automatic WPM calculations
• Error and self-correction tracking
• Progress monitoring over time
• Intervention identification
• GDPR-compliant data storage

But more importantly, it's part of a bigger mission:

To make reading fluency assessment a standard part of UK primary practice - sitting alongside phonics screening and comprehension testing as the third pillar of reading assessment.

Because children deserve educators who can see the full picture of their reading development.

I'm still a full-time Headteacher. I still teach. I still attend parent evenings, deal with budget pressures and prepare for Ofsted.

This isn't a "move fast and break things" Silicon Valley project.

It's a careful, evidence-informed tool built by someone who understands:

• Teacher workload is crushing (so every click matters)
• Child data is sacred (so security is non-negotiable)
• Schools need sustainable systems (so complexity is the enemy)

ReadingFluency.co.uk is designed to work with your existing reading structures, not replace them.

It takes what you're already doing and makes it faster, clearer and more impactful.