Year Review: What 2020 Has Meant for us at David Morgan Education
by Lydia Cockburn || 30 December 2020
There’s no denying, 2020 has been a tough year for everyone around the world.
At David Morgan Education, thanks to our services running online, we have been fortunate enough to be able to continue our work undisrupted. In fact, we’ve been able to help even more parents and teachers with the ever-crucial task of teaching our children to read confidently and accurately, in a time when education has faced unprecedented challenges.
Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to this year, what we’re most proud of, and what we’re looking forward to going forward!
Keeping kids learning in 2020
Helping a child learn to read can be a huge stress in the best of times.
Add to that all the stresses of a global pandemic – isolation, fear, loss, homeschooling, financial insecurity, to name a few – and quite soon you have an incredibly hard situation on your hands.
In light of this, this year we’re particularly proud of our Easyread parents and carers who took decisive action to help their children in the face of a difficult situation. It would have been tempting to give up, but you decided that getting your child reading and writing was the most important thing and committed to putting the work in to get them on track. Well done!
We are proud to have been able to help so many families to work on their children’s reading while they were stuck at home. Particularly in the months of April-June this year, our team were working flat out to support the families on the course who’d taken the opportunity of the sudden shift to homeschooling to work on their children’s literacy in a structured, proven, effective way.
As ever, our primary goal remains to deliver a good outcome to every child who does the Easyread course.
While the journey is smooth for most people, it is not for everyone, and we pride ourselves on our ability to work through any difficulties that arise for those people by delivering extra support. Of the 3000+ children who have joined Easyread this year, only 4 have had a refund. That means that 99.9% of our families have seen good reading progress. Congratulations to all of you!
Here is a small selection of the comments we’ve had:
– J, 12th May 2020
– A, 8th May 2020
– W, 24th May 2020
More Easyreaders than ever!
One of the benefits of Easyread is that you can do it from anywhere, so long as you have an internet connection!
I know I speak for the whole team when I say that we all love this part of the job: helping parents, teachers and children from all around the world.
This year we have had a record number of children on the course. Most are doing the course at home with their family, but we’re also working with more and more schools.
Check out the map of all of this year’s Easyreaders:
New app for beginner readers
After much hard work over the past couple of years, beta testing has begun on our new app for beginner readers! So far, the feedback has been very positive. If you have a 4 or 5-year-old just starting to learn to read, head to this page to test out the app.
Our growing team
As the pandemic hit and affected many people in devastating ways, we were incredibly fortunate to be able to move to home working very easily, since our work has always run online anyway. We recruited 3 new members to our support team in the summer. You can read about us all here!
Online training for schools on the 9 causes of reading difficulty
Following from the success of our book, The 9 Main Causes of Reading Difficulty (which came out in 2018), this year we have started running online Zoom training courses for school staff on the same topic. The teachers we worked with found the course really helpful, so we hope to continue with these in 2021. If you’re a teacher who would be interested, then get in touch!
2021 and beyond
As with many people and businesses at the current time, we cannot be sure exactly what the future holds.
What we do know for sure is that we’ll keep pursuing our mission of helping as many children as we can to learn to read.
With the new Poop Deck app well on its way, more and more schools working with us, and the continued outstanding success levels of Easyread, we are confident it’ll be an exciting year for lots of children!
Lydia Cockburn studied French and Linguistics at Oxford University. She spends her days supporting Easyread families from the Oxford Easyread headquarters. When not helping kids reach their reading goals, she can be found playing music or football!