The Story Behind Speak & Grow
Our Story
Helping every child find the words they need to think, communicate and succeed.
The beginning
Why Speak & Grow was created
Across more than three decades in education, Amanda Smith saw the same thing in classroom after classroom: children who understood far more than they could express. They had thoughtful ideas and real curiosity, but often lacked the words, and the confidence, to share them.
The barrier was rarely ability. It was vocabulary. Children who could not yet name their thinking found it harder to join a discussion, explain their reasoning or show what they truly knew.
Teachers felt it too. They wanted to give every child richer language, but needed an approach that fitted the reality of a busy classroom. It had to be practical and sustainable across a whole school, not another initiative on top of an already full day.
That challenge, helping children find their words in a way that worked for teachers, became the starting point for Speak & Grow.
How it was shaped
Built in classrooms, refined through leadership
Speak & Grow did not begin as a commercial product. It began in classrooms, in the daily work of teaching children and paying close attention to what actually helped them learn.
Years of classroom teaching, curriculum leadership and whole-school implementation shaped every lesson, resource and assessment. Ideas were tried with real classes, kept when they worked and reworked when they did not. The programme grew from practice, not theory alone.
What emerged was not a set of activities but a complete whole-school programme, with one clear cycle for every class to follow: a baseline to begin, structured daily lessons, meaningful conversation that puts new words to work, a chance for children to show what they own, and a final check that makes progress visible. A familiar kind of structure, guided by a philosophy of its own.
Every element has been designed around a single question:
Will this genuinely help teachers while improving outcomes for children?
If the answer was not a clear yes, it did not stay. That discipline continues to guide how Speak & Grow is developed today.
Our philosophy
Meaningful conversations grow richer language. Richer language develops deeper thinking, stronger communication and greater confidence.
This belief underpins everything we build: curriculum design, assessment, professional learning, platform development and future innovation. Each is shaped to protect the same simple idea, that language grows through genuine, meaningful talk.
Technology has an important part to play, but only in support of good teaching. It helps make implementation consistent and manageable; it does not replace the relationship at the heart of every classroom. Teachers remain at the centre.
How we improve
A commitment to evidence
Speak & Grow continues to develop through the things that reveal what genuinely works: classroom implementation, honest feedback from teachers and ongoing evaluation of how children respond over time.
Our early implementation work is already shared openly in the Evidence & Impact section, where the findings are set out with care and appropriate restraint.
The assessment framework is also undergoing independent review. We see that kind of external scrutiny not as a formality but as part of doing this work responsibly. It is a way of testing our thinking and keeping our claims proportionate to the evidence. Continuous improvement, examined openly, is how we intend to earn and keep the trust of the schools we work with.
Our ambition
Looking ahead
In time, Speak & Grow aims to become an international organisation supporting schools to improve children’s spoken language, through practical implementation, evidence-informed practice and high-quality professional learning.
But growth, for us, is a means rather than an end. Every step will be guided by educational impact rather than expansion for its own sake. We would rather support schools well than grow quickly.
Founder
Amanda Smith
Founder, Speak & Grow
Deputy Head of Primary
An international educator with more than thirty years of classroom and leadership experience.
Every child deserves the words to express what they know, what they think and who they can become.
That belief continues to guide everything we build.