There’s a particular kind of madness that descends on us at this time of year. The good kind. The kind where the whole team is running on adrenaline and tea, where the inbox never stops, and where I find myself grinning at my laptop like an idiot. It’s launch season, the time when we open the doors on the National Read-Aloud Challenge, powered by Fonetti, and honestly, it’s the most insane and most wonderful few weeks of our entire year.
So before the gates swing open, I wanted to take a breath and tell you how we got here. Because if you’d told me a few years ago that I’d be writing this, I’m not sure I’d have believed you.
First, the important bit. How to get involved
Every year the rhythm is the same, and there’s something lovely about that.
On the 1st of June, registrations open for schools, giving teachers a full month to get themselves set up and ready before the Challenge goes live. Parents can join the waitlist any time now, and access opens for everyone on the 1st of July, when the Challenge officially begins.
Throughout the Challenge, children get free access to hundreds of books on the Fonetti app. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, news, current affairs, the lot. Content chosen to genuinely interest children of every kind, right across the ages from 5 to 15. Whatever a child is into, there’s something in there for them.
That’s what. Here’s why.
It was never supposed to be for schools
Fonetti was always meant for the home. That was the plan, start to finish. We built it for families, for the sofa, for bedtime, for the quiet ten minutes after dinner when a child reads aloud and someone who loves them listens.
And then Covid happened, and it changed everything.
Before the pandemic, schools were understandably reluctant to take on yet another piece of technology. But lockdown turned that on its head almost overnight. Suddenly there was an appetite, a need, for tools that could help children keep reading when the world had gone strange and small. So during that period we did something we’d never intended to do: we built the Fonetti school platform. And when things began to open up again, we were ready to take on the education market.
I’ll be honest, plenty of smart people warned me how hard that would be. Our wonderful education advisor, Lewis Bronze MBE, told me in no uncertain terms how difficult it is to get traction in education with a new product, especially a new one nobody’s heard of yet. He wasn’t wrong.
But the timing, for me personally, was extraordinary. I’d just exited another business I’d founded, and I made a decision that felt enormous at the time: I invested a large chunk of that money straight into developing a platform that would let us give our home experience away for free, every single summer.
That was the birth of the National Read-Aloud Challenge.
A champion in our corner
I can’t tell this story without telling you about Clare Balding CBE.
Clare was one of our earliest supporters, and she said something to me back then that I’ve never forgotten. She told me she’d always wanted to be part of building something with the potential to change the world, and that she believed this technology was exactly that. Coming from her, it meant everything.
So when we started the Challenge, it was a great joy to me when Clare took on the role of Brand Ambassador. And here’s the thing about Clare: she is not passive. She absolutely gets what we do. Anyone who has ever come to our awards ceremony, whether a child, a teacher, or a partner, knows just how engaged she is, and how wonderful she is with the children. She lights the whole room up. Watching her with them is one of my favourite moments of the entire year.
The moment we got completely, hopelessly, hooked
Here’s the thing about the early days. At the start, the Challenge was supposed to be evidence. Nothing more romantic than that. We needed proof. We needed to be able to look a head teacher in the eye and say, “Here’s what happens to children’s reading when you use this,” with the data to back it up.
But by the middle of that first year, something had shifted in all of us. We were hooked.
Watching the admin panel became our version of Netflix. I’m not exaggerating. We’d sit there in the evenings watching children read, day and night, all over the country. The numbers are ticking up. The streaks. The leaderboards are moving. We could not believe how engaged they were.
And when I step back and think about why, it’s almost embarrassingly simple. All we really did was take the most fundamental skill there is, reading aloud, and gamify it. We curated and created content that children actually find interesting, we added certificates, prizes and, of course, leaderboards. And suddenly you don’t have a reading app. You have one of the most extraordinary reading engagement platforms I’ve ever seen.
The numbers still take my breath away
Let me put it plainly, because the data genuinely floors me.
In our first year, there was one day where children clocked up 104 hours of pure reading in a single day. We thought that was unbelievable.
In 2024, we doubled it, peaking at 224 hours in one day.
And last year, we averaged 279 hours of reading every single day across the entire Challenge period, with one extraordinary day peaking at 454 hours.
Four hundred and fifty-four hours of children reading aloud, in one day, because they wanted to. I still can’t quite take it in.
We were never meant to do this alone
Here’s something I want to say loudly, because it matters: we are not in competition with anyone.
There are some genuinely brilliant reading initiatives that light up the summer, and right at the top of that list is the Summer Reading Challenge, created many years ago by The Reading Agency and run by libraries up and down the country. It isn’t just a tradition. It’s something I think everyone in literacy is proud to be associated with, and that absolutely includes us.
When we created the National Read-Aloud Challenge, we always knew it was different, and we designed it deliberately to sit alongside initiatives like the Summer Reading Challenge, never against them. In fact it was our own Vicki Edgar who summed it up best. She took one look and said, well, it’s obviously the “Read-Aloud” summer initiative, a cheeky play on exactly what we do, because we get children reading out loud. The name stuck, because she was completely right.
And I have to stop and say something about Vicki here, because she has earned it. Vicki is our Fonetti Challenge Ambassador, and she is every single bit as passionate about this as I am. The two of us together are a genuine force to be reckoned with.
Plenty of movement, but let’s have some direction
This launch feels especially poignant, because we’re doing it during the Year of Reading.
The work the National Literacy Trust and the Department for Education have done to shine a light on declining reading among our young children has, in a strange way, been galvanising. It’s named the problem out loud. And our commitment goes well beyond simply running the Challenge: we plan to share all of the phenomenal insight we gather from children actually reading with both the National Literacy Trust and the Department for Education once the Challenge is over.
Because at the end of the day, we all need to work together. Every one of us in this space has the same single aim, to turn around the failing literacy standards among our children, and every one of us wants to do good. But if we all charge off in our own separate directions, we end up with an awful lot of movement and no direction whatsoever. A bit like an octopus on rollerskates. Plenty of energy, arms flailing everywhere, going absolutely nowhere. Pull together, and suddenly all that movement has direction. So we are completely committed to doing our bit.
The woman now steering our ship
There’s one more person I have to tell you about, and I get a bit giddy every time I do.
Over the last couple of years I’ve had the joy of getting to know Louise Hill, the founder of GoHenry. Louise is on her own mission to move the dial, in her case on financial literacy, and she has worked tirelessly lobbying the government to get financial literacy onto the curriculum from primary school upwards. She is relentless, in the best possible way.
So when Louise agreed earlier this year to become our Chair, I was absolutely over the moon. Picture it: a couple of crazy, driven women of a certain age, utterly determined to change the lives of children. Together I think we make a pretty powerful double act, and I could not be prouder to have Louise’s support as Chair of our board.
So, here we go again
If you’re a teacher, registrations are open now. Get your school set up before the 1st of July.
If you’re a parent, join the waitlist and we’ll open the doors to you on launch day.
And if you’re someone who simply cares about children and books, thank you for reading this. Share it. Pass it on. Help us make this the biggest summer of reading yet.
It’s the most insane time of our year. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Let’s go. 📚
Kim
