The Need for Speed

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Updated 04/03/2026

Blackpool Pleasure Beach, peak season. The afternoon sky is heatwave blue and Liam and I are strapped into twin seats on The Big One. When it first opened in 1994, this was the tallest and steepest rollercoaster in the world. Even today, almost 30 years on, it’s still, well, pretty impressive.

Rollercoasting For Beginners - Top Tip: If at all possible, find a fellow human to sit next to. You get the camaraderie. You get the moral support. And, most importantly, you get another body to hold you in check. No-one wants to go solo-rattling around the loop-the-loop like a sack of old spuds.

Everything in order, we begin our ascent. Onwards and upwards, ticking off the signage as we go. 50 feet. This is nothing. 100 feet. The only way is up, baby! 200 feet. 200 feet? Hang on - have I missed one???

But it’s too late to check, because here we are, approaching tipping point, 235 feet above sea level! And now, a few seconds later, here we are plunging headlong into the South Shore surf at an incline angle of 65 degrees, and a speed of 75 miles per hour! This is when the screaming starts.

From Rollercoasters to the Classroom

When it first opened in 1896, Blackpool Pleasure Beach set out “to make adults feel like children again”, and it’s been succeeding in this ambition ever since. But whatever your ride of choice, or preference for being flung upwards, downwards or around in circles, speed is a recurrent constant.

Fast forward to my first Lexonic training event of the new term a couple of weeks later, and an hour down the road in Liverpool, it’s surprising the role that pace plays in many of our activities too.

I’m delivering our SEND/EAL intervention, Lexonic Leap, and, amongst other things, the morning will involve reading and writing graphemes at speed, closely followed by reading and writing words at speed. We will play a game entitled “As Fast as You Can”, and, after lunch, we’ll focus on rapid recall of vowel and split vowel digraphs.

Our sister programme, Lexonic Advance, picks up where Leap leaves off. Syllables at speed. Prefixes at speed. More challenging words at speed. You name it, we’ll put a timer to it, and encourage our students to improve their automaticity every time.

Why the Rush? Pace, Fluency, and Comprehension

But why the rush? Well, as we’re in the business of creating fluent readers. And speed, alongside accuracy and expression, is a key component in this skill.

The faster, and more effortlessly, students are able to read a text, the more capacity they have to apply their inference, deduction and wider comprehension skills, all of which give it its fullest meaning.

In the words of Dr Tim Rasinski (2012):

“In its fullest and most authentic sense, fluency is reading with and for meaning, and any instruction that focuses primarily on speed with minimal regard for reading is wrong.”

So, although each lesson might have its own unique high adrenaline moments, there’ll also be time to explore etymology, to make vocabulary connections and develop metacognitive skills. Our students are in for the ride of their lives. True, they won’t get a photo at the end, but they may well be rewarded with a certificate. And they don't have to scream if they want to go faster!

Build Fluency at the Speed of Sound

Our interventions are designed to build automaticity and fluency, freeing up cognitive load so students can focus on what matters: comprehension.

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