About Lesley Clarke 

lesleyclarke.jpgI started teaching in West London in 1991 and became a literacy co-ordinator 3 years later. In 1998 I was seconded one day a week to work as a literacy consultant in the London Borough of Ealing (this was the first year of the NLS). A year later I became a full time consultant. It was during this time that I first started training teachers on the teaching of phonics and producing materials for use in the classroom.

In 2001 I moved out of London and became the deputy head of an infant school in Buckinghamshire. I provided some of the centrally based phonics training in this authority and also wrote a series of resource books to support teachers using Progression in Phonics (PiPs). These were revised and updated when the Playing with Sounds materials came out in 2004.

I gave up my deputy headship a few years ago, but have continued at the school firstly as a YR class teacher and for the last 2 years a part time Y1 class teacher.  On my non-teaching days I work as a freelance literacy consultant, specialising in the teaching of phonics. This role has included:

  • Training teachers, TAs and students.
  • Providing in school support in the form of demonstration lessons, joint planning with teachers, sharing of resources, monitoring with head teachers and literacy subject leaders etc.
  • Running termly phonics support groups for teachers in YR, Y1 & Y2.
  • Writing for the Primary National Strategy.
  • Working alongside local authority literacy consultants.
  • Lecturing on the PGCE course at Brunel University.
  • Creating resources for use in schools.

It has been very exciting to see the rapid progress that is made by so many children when good synthetic phonics teaching is introduced. For further details, go to the training and support section of the site.

As a practising teacher and consultant, I am still producing and trialling a range of teaching resources (see the resources section of this website). Having had a great deal of positive feedback on these resources, I decided to set up this website to make them accessible to a wider audience. The aim of the site is to provide quality synthetic phonics resources, including (in time), a list of recommended resources and links to selected sites. This should save busy practitioners from having to waste time wading through all the synthetic phonics resources available on line, only to find that a large proportion of them are of poor quality and little use.

I would love to hear about any good synthetic phonics resources practitioners have used/found, so I can evaluate them for inclusion in the recommended resources section. I would also welcome suggestions for resources you would like to be able to download from this site. Click on the ‘wish list’ box on the left to contact me.