“Smart” Reading Intervention

Reading Copilot is our school reading intervention system for students aged 8-18. It is a science-of-reading tool that uses empirically-proven techniques, based on 20 years of active research. Every student can become a skilled reader… when you teach the way their brain wants to learn.

Our primary innovation is called trainertext, which allows the student to work out any word phonetically and thus build confidence, fluency, and comprehension. It is successful daily practice that builds reading proficiency.

Each student begins the Reading Copilot journey with an initial 1:1 diagnostic session with one of our experts. That allows us to generate an individual intervention plan. Then they begin attending 15-minute daily group sessions, facilitated by a teaching assistant.

Why Interventions Often Disappoint

Reading interventions have always achieved patchy results because the causes of frustration vary so much from student to student. I am sure you have seen that.

So a fixed intervention will inevitably not deal with the issue for certain individuals. Sometimes the results are poor enough for senior leaders to question whether they are worth investing in. So special needs departments get starved of the resources needed.

But if you map the challenges for each student and create an individual intervention plan for them, the pattern of results can be transformed. Success then breeds confidence and you can reach a point where this issue is truly overcome. That adaptive approach is what we mean by smart intervention.

Life-Changing

Reading Copilot will transform more than just reading standards. This is life-changing for every member of staff and all the other students in the school too, because patterns of disruption are transformed too.

Listen to teachers from our UK research trials discussing the other impacts they have seen in students as they learned to read:

Age-Appropriate

The books in the Reading Copilot Trainertext Library are optimized for older students. The psychology of learning is very critical. Reading Copilot can work for teenagers and adults just as well as younger students, without anyone feeling patronized by inappropriate texts.

Hands-Free

The system is designed so that the student can do their daily sessions unassisted. 

This is important for their psychology, but also means that a single teaching assistant can monitor a group of 4-5 students doing the daily reading practice in just 15 minutes.

Low staff hours makes the intervention affordable both in time and money.

Holistic

Any intervention process must be learner-focused and individualized to be successful. Our baseline assessment pinpoints nine different possible causes of difficulty for a student, to ensure that we have overcome every barrier that they individually face. The assessment process and resulting recommendations are all included in the intervention cost.

Evidence-Based

The trainertext phonics methodology was studied in a randomized control trial done by the Open University. You can read the full paper here, which was shortlisted for a prize for academic excellence. You can read a summary of the results here.

The cohort of 90 children were 2+ years behind and all caught up bar one within 6 months of trainertext intervention.

We have been directly delivering reading intervention since 2008 from our headquarters in Oxford, England and have worked directly with over 15,000 reluctant readers and dyslexics across the English-speaking world. 

Supported by Experts

Reading Copilot is guided by an expert Reading Tutor who will identify and track nine potential causes of reading frustration for your students.

They meet directly with your students regularly and with your staff member any time you need. This vastly accelerates outcomes and removes the need for lengthy training processes. You can get started right away.

What’s Possible

Here are a couple of videos to give you a feel for the sort of transformation that is possible, even after years of frustration.

Cost

What is weak literacy costing your school at the moment? Think about the cost of multiple interventions, extra teacher support time, scribes, computing resources, assessment processes and behaviour management by the senior leadership team. It is huge, isn’t it?

What is it costing in terms of results too? How can a student achieve their potential when they cannot read the subject text books accurately and fluently? How can all the other students achieve their potential when their teachers are distracted by the needs of this minority?

The cost of Reading Copilot is £250/$320 per student with a minimum of ten students. Most schools have around 20 students arriving each year with weaknesses in their literacy. We guarantee that this can be eradicated for around £5k/$6.5k per annum. We do not charge if the process has not been successful for a student.

Funded Trial

The good news is that we have funding in place for a first group of five students in your school. So you can see the impact without needing to allocate any budget.

Get in Touch

If you would like to explore Reading Copilot further, just book in for an exploratory chat by reserving a time in our calendar: