Meet the team  

Susan Case

Susan is a qualified and experienced primary school teacher and lecturer. She has taught throughout Oxfordshire and the south-west, running workshops for parents and inset training courses for teachers. She holds a B.A. degree from the University of Delaware, USA and a PGCE from Oxford Brookes University. She has worked extensively with linguistic phonic methods with children throughout the primary and secondary age ranges, both in a clinical setting and in schools. She is currently teaching children with special needs on a part-time basis and working on the promotion of Sounds ~Write in schools, whilst completing her Master’s degree at Bath University.

Dave Philpot

After reading a science psychology degree at Manchester University, I then taught for six years in mainstream and special schooling before training as an educational psychologist in 1974. Since then I have worked as a child psychologist for the Metropolitan Borough of Wigan with special interests in behavioural psychology, neuroscience and psychometrics.

Pupil failure to achieve competency in literacy is the predominant theme that has always accompanied my professional work with children in respect of both academic and behavioural problems. It has been a great relief to me to see the theory and research carried out over the last fifty years coming together in the mid- to late1990’s to show why so many UK pupils continue to fail to achieve adequate basic literacy skills. I am privileged to have been able to play a small part in transforming that current theoretical knowledge about language and literacy into the practical teaching programme that we have called Sounds~Write.

John Walker

John has been a qualified teacher, university lecturer and teacher trainer for over thirty years, teaching English language and literature in many different countries and settings. He holds undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications from Sussex , Warwick and Edinburgh universities. He specialises in the teaching of linguistic phonics: he runs the Reading Centre, a literacy clinic, in Buckingham, trains teachers, and promotes the Sounds ~ Write programme in schools. In addition, he is an associate lecturer for the Open University, teaching on the courses Working with Children in the Early Years and Supporting Children’s Learning in the Early Years.

Trainers

Ginny Campbell

Ginny Campbell has worked in primary, special and secondary education and was SENCo at Kingsbridge Community College for 10 years.  She has been running courses on inclusion, TA induction and literacy for the past 9 years, and provides Sounds~Write training to teachers and TAs in Devon and neighbouring LAs.  Ginny can be contacted via Sounds~Write.

Mary Gladstone

Mary runs Sounds-Write courses in Australia (New South Wales), read more on our 'Australia' page.

Verla Shaw