My sister-in-law is a primary school teacher. Most weekends the family would get together for a barbecue and backyard games. And at some point she'd always have to sneak off to her laptop. Not to browse or catch up on messages. To plan next week's phonics lessons. Cross-referencing word lists against her programme's scope and sequence. Hunting for decodable texts that actually matched what her students had been taught. Building slides she'd use once and rebuild the following week.
She wasn't complaining. She'd long accepted this as part of the job.
I started asking questions. Why are you manually building all of this? Do all teachers have to do this? Shouldn't you be focused on just teaching? The answers painted a picture of something deeply fragmented. Programmes existed but weren't connected to lesson materials. Word lists lived in spreadsheets. Resources came from five different places and none of them talked to each other. When I pushed on why it was all so disconnected, she just shrugged. That's how it's always been.
I come from a background in computer science, where you learn to think in systems and structure. So I started reading. The Science of Reading. Systematic synthetic phonics. Evidence for Learning. What surprised me wasn't the research itself, it was how clear and well-established it already was, and how little of it had been turned into actual tools. The frameworks existed. The evidence existed. But teachers were still left to bridge the gap on a Sunday night.
So I started building. The early versions were rough, but the rule was always the same: every word, every story, every game had to be bound to exactly what a class had been taught. No guesswork. No filtering by instinct. That rule shaped everything Phonicspal became.
She still plans. But it takes minutes now, not hours. And she's back at the barbecue.
I've since learned her story isn't unique.