The bits of English nobody told you about.
Complete programmes for primary spelling, grammar and writing, and the training that goes with them. Bought once and owned outright, and written so that teachers finish the year knowing more about English than they did at the start of it.
Spelling, grammar, writing.
Making English make sense, for the children and for the people teaching them.
wordLAB — spelling
A complete spelling programme for Years 2 to 6. Thirty-six units a year, with every resource they need, the statutory word lists taught on their own cycle, and the subject knowledge written into every unit. Bought once and owned outright.
See the programmeRainbow Grammar
Every part of an English sentence given a colour, so that its structure stops being invisible. Children see how sentences are built, imitate the patterns and use them in their own writing — Years 1 to 6, sentence level and word level.
See the programmeWriting Clusters
A different way of organising a writing unit. Instead of three weeks building towards one long piece, children write shorter pieces more often, returning to the same content and the same techniques until the learning is secure.
See the trainingOnline training
Live online courses for schools already using the programmes: two short courses to bring new staff up to speed, and six half-termly sessions for the subject leader who has to lead it across the school.
See the coursesNothing about writing is a mystery.
English is not the arbitrary mess it is reputed to be. Its spellings answer to a phonology, a morphology and a documented history. Its sentences are built from a small number of structures that can be seen, named and imitated. And a piece of writing has a shape that can be planned and taught rather than hoped for. Very little of that is covered at school, and not much more of it in teacher training.
So everything here teaches the teacher first, at all three levels: the word, the sentence and the whole text. The subject knowledge is written into the materials rather than assumed, in plain English, with no phonetic alphabet and nothing taken for granted. Teachers do not simply deliver these programmes; they come away knowing considerably more about the language than they did before.
Thirty years, and still in classrooms.
A teacher in Nottingham, then Primary English consultant for Nottingham LA, leading city-wide work on writing, reading, phonics and assessment. And still teaching children as often as the diary allows — which is what keeps all of this honest.
From the blog.
Sporadic musings, rambles, rants and occasional lucidity.
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a small dose of wrong
“An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation.” Mahatma Gandhi
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Mind Your Ps And Qs
Blog/17 September 2026 Mind your ⟨p⟩s and ⟨q⟩s “A place for everything, and everything in its place.”Proverb…
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Sold On Vocabulary, Strong On Spelling
“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts, for support rather than illumination.” Andrew Lang