Toe By Toe

Keda spent almost all of her teaching career at one school - Sandal Road Primary School in Baildon, UK. She also almost exclusively taught just one age group, 6-7 year-olds; the age that most children pick up their reading skills. This was to become Keda’s great passion - the teaching of reading. Initially, she was baffled as to why a significant proportion of the children in her classes struggled to pick up basic reading skills. To Keda, they were just as bright as the other children but - for them - reading remained a mysteriously difficult skill. Keda always had a keen and inquisitive mind and this question of why some children had difficulties in learning to read nagged at her. She thought that she had somehow failed these students, so she made an offer to their parents. She asked their permission to teach their children at her home - without charge - at the end of the school day. As a result of this offer, Keda’s house was soon overflowing with struggling readers. Keda even designed an extension to her house to include a custom-built classroom and persuaded her doting husband Albert to build it. For the next 30 years, Keda’s house - literally, just a stone’s throw away from the school where she worked - was full of children. Between 4-5pm every school day she looked for ways to improve their reading skills. Keda's All-Consuming Passion At the time Keda began her research into children’s reading problems, few people had even heard of the term ‘dyslexia’. Keda became fascinated by the condition and her private research soon became an all-consuming obsession. She divided the children into two groups. A control group where conventional methods were used, and her ‘guinea pigs’, where Keda tried anything and everything to see what would work. This painstaking process of trial and error became the genesis of what later came to be known as Toe By Toe. Keda had no idea what was happening in the psychology departments of universities. She simply looked at the reading process and pared it down to the bare essentials necessary to crack the code of this ‘reading thing’. This is also why Toe By Toe is so refreshingly free of jargon and psychological gobbledygook. It certainly wasn’t a ‘quick fix’ process. Only after decades of this meticulous approach did Toe By Toe eventually become the fully functioning system we have now. Keda named the system ‘Toe By Toe’ after a grateful parent commented that she could see how it worked: “Progress by tiny steps – almost one toe at a time…”