About Reading Fluency

I'm Simon Sharp, headteacher of Fetcham Village Infant School in Surrey. 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 teach, still do parents' evenings and still wrestle the budget.

Reading Fluency is what I built because my own school needed it.

For two years running, more than 90% of our children passed the phonics screening check. Our phonics teaching was working, and the data proved it.

Then we noticed something odd. Children who had sailed through the check were getting stuck on the harder books. Not because they couldn't decode the words, but because they couldn't read quickly enough to make sense of longer sentences.

Their decoding was perfect. Their fluency wasn't.

Jamie Hallums, our school improvement partner, helped us see it for what it was: fluency, a skill you can measure and teach, sitting between phonics and comprehension. Not “can they read the words?” but “how are they reading them?” Word by word or in phrases? At a pace that makes meaning? With any expression at all?

It started as an assessment. Two to three minutes with a child and an unpractised passage, and you have their accuracy, their words correct per minute and how their reading sounds. We trialled it at Fetcham, and it changed how we grouped and taught.

Then schools asked the obvious question: “Now what do we teach?” So it grew into a programme. Nine stages, Birch to Cedar. Find where each child is, build their fluency, support the ones who need more and prove it worked.

• The Reading Fluency Assessment. In the app. Places every child on a stage.
• Dawn Chorus. One poem, one week, at every stage. Depth.
• The Story Trail. Illustrated classroom books and episode booklets. Distance.
• Fluent Foundations. A ten-minute daily intervention. Coming soon.
• The Reading Fluency Handbook. The whole method in one book, published by Nectarwood Press on 26 October 2026, in print and on Kindle.
• Training. Staff training from Simon: a training day, staff meetings and support in school. Subscribers also get all six sessions in the app to run themselves.

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. More written comprehension won't build that. Reading out loud, with expression and meaning, will.

Teacher time is precious, so every click has to earn its place. Children's data is sacred, so it stays secure and is never used to train AI (our AI promise).

Reading Fluency (readingfluency.co.uk) is a reading fluency programme for UK primary schools. It assesses accuracy, words correct per minute and prosody in two to three minutes per child, places each child on one of nine stages from Birch to Cedar, and provides the teaching to move them on: Dawn Chorus poetry, Story Trail books, the Fluent Foundations intervention, staff training and The Reading Fluency Handbook.

Built by Simon Sharp, headteacher of Fetcham Village Infant School, Surrey. Founded 2025. Used in 137 schools. Reading Fluency is a trading name of Nectarwood Ltd. Free 30-day trial, no card needed. Pricing.