25/08/2026
One of the biggest things Iāve learnt from working with children?
You have to find the gap before you can fill it āØ
If a child is in Year 3 and struggling with reading, simply giving them more Year 3 reading work isnāt necessarily going to help.
Because the difficulty might have started much earlier.
Maybe they never became confident blending sounds.
Maybe short vowels arenāt secure.
Maybe they can read a word but struggle to hold onto what theyāve read.
Maybe spelling patterns have been introduced before the foundations underneath them were solid.
Maybe theyāve become really good at guessing, memorising or avoiding, and nobody has actually pinpointed where things started to become tricky.
The same happens in maths āļøāā
A child might be struggling with multiplication, but the actual gap could be number sense, place value, skip counting or basic addition facts.
This is why I donāt believe in simply giving a child more work at their year level and hoping eventually it clicks.
I want to know:
What do they already understand?
Where did the learning become shaky?
What is missing underneath?
And then we go back there.
No shame.
No rushing to ācatch upā.
No worrying about what page everyone else is on .
We meet the child where they actually are and build forward from there.
Because sometimes a child doesnāt need more teaching.
They need someone to work out what was missed. š¤
