I am a UK and NZ-trained teacher, tutor and assessor, who has specialized in literacy development, special needs and dyslexia. I was originally a language teacher at secondary level, teaching French, German and Spanish, but came into this field as a result of my own sons and husband being diagnosed as dyslexic. Since then, I have spent around 20 years as an assessor and become passionate about literacy teaching and stopping learners from falling through the gaps! As part of that, I have been involved in research into instant visual recognition and the Visual Word Form Area and have designed a test which measures how many milliseconds it takes a learner to recognise a known word.