Thursday, August 8, 2024
15 Years – What’s The Scale of Our Success?
What does success look like? What’s true linear progress?
We spend a lot of time asking ourselves these questions, not least because our whole business is rooted in enabling young people to advance their reading and literacy skills.
For a company like ours, it’s vital that we can demonstrate the upward trajectory of average reading age scores, vocabulary growth, and much-improved comprehension.
As a business, success markers matter more broadly, too!
As we shared earlier this week – it’s our 15th birthday.
We’ve seized the opportunity to look over our timeline and see what successes we’ve accomplished and where this positions us as we navigate forward into another really exciting chapter of our journey.
Here are just some of those major achievements:
- We’ve gone from being a kitchen-table start-up (thanks to our founder Katy Parkinson) in 2009, to a business employing 40+ staff
- We began delivering our earliest reading programmes to a handful of schools from 2011
- By 2014, such was our growth in confidence, clarity and customer retention, that we adopted a more concise brand identity of 'Sound Training'
- In 2015 came a really significant impact evaluation, delivered by Northumbria University – a particularly key point for us, as it was the first recognition of our programmes achieving 27 months average reading age gains
- Just one year later – in 2016 – we were on a real mission. We launched a pilot prisons project, and we trained teachers in the US states of Maine and Florida
- Our international success grew further in 2017, with our first partnerships confirmed in the UAE
- A far more bold brand was born in 2017 when we became Lexonik
- 2020 may have been a strange time for many businesses, but for us, it was elevating our approach to online delivery, and it saw us secure a MAT contract with Northern Education Trust
- Two years later, in 2022, an impressive National Literacy Trust impact evaluation was concluded
- 2022 saw us secure our first DfE grant
- And in 2024, with clients around the world, more than 40 staff, a growing number of programmes, and some incredible reading age scores achieved across our customer-base, we moved to our new home – Victoria House in Thornaby
That’s just a quick rundown of our last 15 years, but we think it’s been a helpful exercise to take stock of those landmarks.
It reminds us of where we’ve come from, and where we’re heading.
And of course, in that 15 years, we know there are children who have gone from 'scarcely able to read and certainly not comprehend', to:
- Able to fluently read text for school, work and pleasure
- Able to develop a strong CV and curate it in such a way their job prospects are enhanced
- Able to have the confidence to pursue a passion, a career path, or a life-affirming opportunity which might have been impossible without a grasp of reading
How much do you use success markers to check in on your own progress, or that of your pupils or your own children?
If we can share one really key takeaway, it’s that whenever you use data as a judgment of success, always consider the context and the true value and worth that the data brings.
Reading age scores can be measured in numbers, but it’s the joy of achievement and the creation of more freedom and opportunity in life, which makes us most proud.
We’ve been passionately and relentlessly changing lives and optimising the potential of others for 15 years.
And our best work is yet to come…
Ready to empower learners? Start your new literacy journey today.
Equip learners with essential reading skills and a rich vocabulary for lifelong success.