Great Expectations Education

Great Expectations Education Mama to 4 boys, parent carer and vicar’s wife.

Neurodivergent, experienced and highly qualified SEN specialist teacher (AMBDA, M.Ed, L7 dyslexia, L5 dyscalculia) offering online tuition and consultancy services.

I’ve started looking ahead to the autumn term, and I’m opening some consultation slots.I offer a one-off session called ...
25/08/2026

I’ve started looking ahead to the autumn term, and I’m opening some consultation slots.

I offer a one-off session called ‘Raking the Fire’. You bring something specific you’d like to think through, I read anything you send in advance, we talk for 55 minutes, and you get a plain-English written summary afterwards. You don’t need to have worked out what you think before we start.

If it’s a report you need making sense of rather than a conversation, that’s ‘Afore a Good Fire’.

Not everything needs a full consultation, though. Some questions come up on a Tuesday and want answering that week. That’s what the messaging tiers are for - ongoing WhatsApp support, or email if you’d rather, with a proper answer rather than a quick line back. Term-time only, so you’re not paying through the holidays.

I’ve been a specialist teacher for dyslexia and SEN for nineteen years, and I’m a parent to four neurodivergent children myself. Most parents who reach me aren’t short of information. They’re short of someone to help work out which bits of it apply to their child, and in what order.

What it isn’t: an assessment, or legal advice. Other services and advocates offer support in that area.

The bench is in my local park, photographed one evening in the middle of July, in the heatwave, when it was finally cool enough to be outside.

All four formats, with prices and what each one includes:

https://greatexpectationseducation.uk/before-the-fire

I make illustrated word histories, one word or common phrase to a resource, and I’m making them for my sons.The older on...
20/08/2026

I make illustrated word histories, one word or common phrase to a resource, and I’m making them for my sons.

The older one is dyslexic and is learning French and German at the same time. Two languages’ worth of vocabulary to hold onto, when holding onto vocabulary is the thing he finds hardest. The younger one has no such difficulty. He’s just interested in language and how it’s put together, which turns out to be a completely different reason to want the same thing.

Each resource takes a single word or phrase and shows how it’s built and where it came from.

So ‘transport’, ‘import’, ‘portable’ and ‘porter’ stop being four separate things to memorise and become one idea - ‘port’, to carry - turning up four times.

A word with a reason behind it is easier to hold onto than an arbitrary one, and for a child who finds rote learning punishing, that changes what’s being asked of him.

It works in French and German because those languages aren’t strangers to English. They’re relatives. ‘Wasser’ and ‘water’. ‘Vater’ and ‘father’. A French child carrying something uses ‘porter’.

And every resource ends with the English words built from the same root, so the work runs both ways. A child revising French vocabulary is building their English vocabulary at the same time.

This isn’t a hunch. I read Linguistics with English Language at university and wrote my dissertation on where the pronoun ‘thou’ went, so language history is my own specialism. Alongside that: an M.Ed in Inclusive Education, a Level 7 SpLD qualification with AMBDA, PATOSS member, ten years as a secondary English teacher, and a specialist teacher for dyslexia and SEN since 2007. I tutor one to one, online.

It’s all in ‘The Anvil’, and from there you can go into whichever workshop you need - English morphology, phonics, handwriting, or the French, German, Spanish and Italian etymology shops. Each shop shows you examples of the resources, so you can see exactly what you’d be getting before you buy anything:
https://greatexpectationseducation.uk/structured-literacy-resources

If you want the reasoning rather than the resources, I’ve written up what the research actually says, including the parts where it’s thinner than I’d like:

https://greatexpectationseducation.uk/teaching-words-through-structure

And The Hearth is my newsletter, on word origins and notes from inside the SEND system. Sign up and you’ll get codes for free resources each month:
https://greatexpectationseducation.uk/newsletter

The photo is Honfleur back in the spring. The sign in the archway says ‘atelier’, which is where my French shop got its name. In the fourteenth century an ‘astelier’ was a heap of wood, then the place where a craftsman worked it, and only by the fifteenth century a workshop of any sort. It comes from Old French ‘astelle’, a splinter of wood.

If a diagnostic report has landed in your inbox for your child this summer - dyslexia, SpLD, an Ed Psych assessment - an...
09/08/2026

If a diagnostic report has landed in your inbox for your child this summer - dyslexia, SpLD, an Ed Psych assessment - and you've stared at the page of scores wondering what any of it actually means, this might help.

I've put a page together on the Compendium walking through the assessments you're most likely to see in a report: the CTOPP-2, the WISC-V, the TOD, the YARC, the DASH-2, and ten more, plus what the numbers underneath them mean - standardised scores, percentiles, confidence intervals.

I read these reports all the time as a dyslexia specialist, and I'm currently reading one as a parent of one of my own children going through assessment.

The professional and parent experiences are different - and I've written this page with both in mind, so a parent can find their way around a report without being a specialist.

Link in the first comment.

'That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.'This is the view from inside Glücksburg Cas...
06/08/2026

'That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.'

This is the view from inside Glücksburg Castle on the German-Danish border, photographed last summer.

Lahiri puts this line into the mouth of a character in The Namesake — a novel about a family living between two cultures, never quite belonging to either.

You're inside, looking out at somewhere else entirely. That's the feeling she's describing.

I took a photo on Fleet Street of the old DC Thomson building - the newspaper names painted straight down the brickwork,...
03/08/2026

I took a photo on Fleet Street of the old DC Thomson building - the newspaper names painted straight down the brickwork, 'Sunday Post', 'People's Friend', 'People's Journal', 'Dundee Courier'. It was the building I'd gone for, but 'journal' caught my eye afterwards.
'journal' has meant 'the daily one' for nearly seven hundred years - it just keeps changing what it's daily about. When it arrived in English in the mid-14th century, a 'journal' was a book of the daily church services. By the late 15th it was the daily account-book, around 1600 the personal diary, and by 1728 the daily paper. The one thing that never changes is the day - it goes back to Latin 'dies', 'day'.
The Romans were doing it first, though. They had the 'Acta Diurna', the 'daily acts', official notices posted up in the Forum from 59 BC - same root. A masthead on Fleet Street and a Roman noticeboard turn out to be the same habit: write down the day and put it where people can see it.

That same 'day' root runs right through French - it's hiding in 'jour', in 'toujours' ('all days', so 'always') and in 'aujourd'hui' ('on the day of today') - and on into Italian 'giorno' and Spanish 'jornada'. There are cards for all of them over in the language shops.

New on the blog - link in the comments.

'The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — 'tis the difference between ...
30/07/2026

'The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — 'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.'

These are the orchids I have in the house. They thrive on neglect, which is the only reason I still have them. Every one of them is an orchid. Not one of them is the same.

Twain wrote this in a letter in 1888 and it's the argument I find myself making most often when working with children on vocabulary: close isn't the same as right. Happy and joyful. Sad and devastated. Angry and furious. The gap between them is where precision lives.

'Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.'Bacon wrote this in 1625. ...
23/07/2026

'Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.'

Bacon wrote this in 1625.

The baguettes are from a supermarket near Calais, bought on the way back from France last summer.

Buy three, get one free — which is also a reasonable reading strategy.

Some books you grab quickly and consume on the journey. A few you take your time with.

The best books, like the best bread, reward the time you give them.

A new term will be here before we know it, and I've got a bit of space opening up for new tuition students - so this fee...
19/07/2026

A new term will be here before we know it, and I've got a bit of space opening up for new tuition students - so this feels like a good moment to say a little about how I work, for anyone weighing it up.

I teach children who find reading, spelling, handwriting, or maths harder than the classroom allows for - dyslexia, dyscalculia, working memory, or a child who's decided they're just no good at it.

Alongside those, a lot of the children I work with are autistic, have ADHD, or a PDA profile, and some are in school while others have been home educated for years. A lot of what I do is vocabulary work through the structure of words, or maths built up slowly from the ground, or getting handwriting to a place where it stops getting in the way.

Some of the children I work with have already had a rough ride by the time they reach me, so the first few sessions are often less about the subject than about establishing that this is going to be different.

I'm a specialist dyslexia teacher, and this has been my field for a long time - the interest started during my linguistics degree, my PGCE (secondary English) dissertation was on dyslexia, and I took my Masters and Level 7 SpLD qualification early on in my career. I'm currently working towards a Diploma in Autism and Mental Health with NCAMH. I'm also parent to neurodivergent children, and neurodivergent myself - so I come at this from more than one direction.

Sessions are online, one to one, and built around the actual child in front of me rather than a scheme.

Details are on my website -

https://greatexpectationseducation.uk/tuition.

Double sunflowers, Oxford University Botanic Garden, taken a few days ago.

'Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times? As if something were left between the pages...
16/07/2026

'Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times? As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells... and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower... both strange and familiar.'

This is the churchyard next to our house.

Funke puts this into the mouth of a character called Mo in Inkspell — it's fiction, but it's one of the most accurate descriptions of re-reading I've come across. I have books I've read four or five times and each time I find something I left there: a worry I had, a place I was, a version of myself I'd half forgotten.

'Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up,...
09/07/2026

'Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real.'

'Hollowpox' by Jessica Townsend, arrived on publication day.

My cherries — I love cherries. A summer afternoon in the garden that was entirely real and entirely somewhere else at the same time.

Ephron understood this better than most. She wasn't writing about children's books specifically, but she could have been.

The Nevermoor series is exactly the kind of somewhere else worth going.

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Rickmansworth
ABC123

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