Meet The Upstream Team
Our team is passionate about early dyslexia risk screening in Reception and Year 1. Our approach follows IDA and Delphi guidance, which highlights early signs linked to dyslexia risk, including weak phonemic awareness and difficulties with phonological working memory. These difficulties are likely to create challenges with learning phonics. Blending and segmenting skills are essential for phonics acquisition, so identifying children who need extra support in Term 1 helps prevent the dyslexia paradox, where pupils do not receive help until difficulties have become entrenched.
The main focus of the early years pilot is the personalised support provided to children by the TA. The Speedie Readies system is evidence based, inclusive, and designed to ensure that children receive the help they need, as individuals, as early as possible.
We also offer a Ten Minutes a Day Spelling Routine for KS2 dyslexic pupils.
Who are We?
I’m Emma Hartnell-Baker and I have a Masters degree in Special Education Needs. I’m undertaking doctoral research at the University of Reading, studying how teachers make decisions when asked to support children to map words that contain GPCs not covered in their synthetic phonics programme, for example sugar. I have taught full time in school managed nurseries inspected as outstanding, and I have served as an OFSTED Inspector with responsibility for inspecting Early Years settings. I also worked for the Queensland Education Department advising schools on behaviour and spent ten years supporting schools to improve literacy school wide. My approach there is called the Speech Sound Pics (SSP) Approach. It is a visual and linguistic approach to phonics, taught differently because children work through the GPCs tested in the PSC at their pace. I still train teachers to use Duck Hands to segment words, and to use and teach children 'The Monster Spelling Routine" in all primary grades.
Dr Grace Elliott provides professional diagnostic assessments for dyslexia and dyscalculia. She has more than fifteen years of experience as an assessor, SENCO, and teacher of SEND, with APC, ATS, PG Cert SENCO, and AMBDA. After completing an MSc at Oxford University focusing on dyslexia, she completed a PhD to investigate effective intervention for children with reading difficulties. Grace has published articles and presented at conferences within the UK and internationally, and she most recently worked at the British Dyslexia Association as the Professional Practice Manager.
We met at a conference and have collaborated on several projects including delivering training for PATOSS and presenting at the World Literacy Foundation. We are both AuDHD and Grace is dyslexic.
Libby Charlton reached out after attending the PATOSS training and has since added the Phonemies to her work in schools, with significant improvements in outcomes. Libby is dyslexic and brings a strong professional background to this work. She holds AMBDA, a Level 7 PG Diploma from Bath Spa University, and Qualified Teacher Status. She has an Assessment Practising Certificate, full membership of PATOSS, and an FE Teaching Practice Certificate from City and Guilds, Stage 1 and 2. Libby also holds a BA Hons in Contemporary Dance with first class honours, as well as RAD and ISTD teaching certificates in ballet, modern, and national dance.
Our experiences in schools, supporting children who learn differently, together with our own lived experience, mean that we bring considerable passion to this work. We are all concerned about the impact of a one size fits all approach and the lack of upstream screening, because we see the consequences in classrooms every day.
Earlier this year Emma Hartnell-Baker scored 85 percent in the Women in Innovation competition from Innovate UK. The aim was to fund a screener for three year olds, before they start learning phonics. Below you will see the basics we use to introduce how speech sounds connect with print using Duck Hands and Phonemies, even with just six phonemes, to reduce cognitive load.
Word Mapping is Easier When We Show the Code!
We help those working with children to offer personalised phonics with each child, for example exploring word mapping in relation to their own accent, or exploring how others say words. For example, the problem with ideas such as a vowel being “r-controlled”. The vowel sound doesn't change, there’s simply an extra sound added. So you can’t keep the same grapheme markers because you’re mapping two sounds, not a single altered phoneme. This is far easier for little ones to understand. If we use different sounds, the Phonemies change. Sometimes the graphemes change too. It aligns more easily with the underpinning theory behind the teaching of letters and sounds through phonics too.
Mapping words with an accent can be a brilliant way to raise awareness of our differences, and be proactive about inclusion. When teachers are told to teach phonics as if everyone speaks English in exactly the same way, we miss opportunities to talk about speech as something deeply personal.
Thinking about the speech sounds used in words, and the letters that connect to them in all words, including ‘sight words’, is a game changer for those supporting children to connect speech and print, especially those at risk of dyslexia.