Rhona Stainthorp is a research professor at the University of Reading, Institute of Education. She began her professional career teaching in an all- boys secondary school in the UK where many pupils could not read. She had to find a way to help those young men, so she went to study psychology at Birkbeck College London. Since that time she has worked as an academic psychologist training teachers and speech and language therapists about the development of literacy and literacy difficulties. Her research relates to reading, spelling and writing development in typical and atypically developing children. She has been advising successive UK governments for the last 25 years on various aspects of the teaching of literacy. In 1986/7 she spent a year in Australia as a visitor to Monash University and since that time has collaborated in various capacities with the Special Education Centre at Macquarie University.