The child who hated reading taught me everything I needed to know.

I taught primary for over fifteen years. I worked in East Renfrewshire, in schools where a significant number of children came from some of the most deprived postcodes in Scotland, SIMD 1, 2, and 3. I loved that work. It was hard, frequently frustrating, and occasionally heartbreaking, but I loved it.

There was a boy in my class, I will call him Ryan, who made it very clear from the first week that reading was not for him. Not the books we had. Not the comprehension sheets. Not the paired reading sessions. Not the reading corner with its carefully arranged cushions and its laminated genre labels. None of it.

Ryan was not a quiet refuser. He was loud about it. He would groan when we got the reading books out. He would finish in two minutes and spend the rest of the time staring at the ceiling or bothering the person next to him. His mum told me at parents evening that he never picked up a book at home either. She looked tired when she said it, like she had already tried everything she could think of.

What Ryan was, and I want to be clear about this, was sharp. He was funny. He had an answer for everything. He knew the name of every player in every team in the Scottish Premiership, their statistics, their transfer history. He could tell you exactly why Celtic had made a mistake in the January window. He had a working knowledge of football that most adults would struggle to match.

He just did not read.

The problem was never Ryan.

I spent a long time trying to fix Ryan. Different books, different reading groups, different approaches to the comprehension questions. I tried non-fiction. I tried comics. I tried letting him pick anything he wanted from the book corner. He picked a book about football once and got through about three pages before he put it down. It was too easy. He was nine years old and reading at a level two years below where he should have been, and the football book, the one I thought might finally land, was written for a six-year-old.

That was the moment I started to understand the problem differently. It was not that Ryan did not want to read. It was that everything we offered him either bored him because it had nothing to do with his life, or frustrated him because it was pitched at a level that made him feel like he could not keep up. We kept giving him the same choice: texts that were too hard, or texts that were too easy. Neither felt like reading for him. They both felt like being reminded that reading was something other people did.

The books that existed for a child at Ryan's reading level were not written for Ryan. They were written for a much younger child. And the books written for a nine-year-old boy who loved football and had strong opinions about the transfer window were not written at Ryan's reading level. There was no overlap. There was no book for Ryan. There was just a gap where Ryan should have been.

What nobody tells you about reluctant readers.

In fifteen years of teaching I worked with a lot of Ryans. Different names, different interests, different gaps. But the same fundamental problem. The reading materials available in most primary schools sit on a spectrum from too easy to too hard, with very little in between, and almost none of it feels personally relevant to the children who need it most.

The children who are already strong readers will find something. They always do. They have enough fluency and confidence to push through a text that does not quite fit. They read around the edges. They build vocabulary and stamina almost despite what we give them.

The children who are struggling do not have that buffer. Every text that does not fit is a small confirmation that reading is not for them. That compounds. By upper primary, many of them have already made up their minds. Ryan had made up his mind at nine.

What I wish I had understood sooner is that the problem was almost never motivation in the abstract. It was always relevance and access together. A child will push through difficulty for a story that matters to them. A child will not push through difficulty for a story about nothing they care about. The gap between those two things is where most reluctant readers live.

The question I kept coming back to.

After I left the classroom I kept thinking about Ryan. About how close he was. If I could have given him a story about football, about the Scottish Premiership, about a nine-year-old boy who was the best midfielder his team had ever seen, written at exactly the level where he could access it without it feeling like a struggle, I genuinely believe he would have read it. I believe he would have asked for the next one.

That question, why does that book not exist, why can't I make it for him right now, was the question that eventually became Everybody Reads.

The platform generates personalised stories for every child at their exact reading level, built around their own interests, with them as the main character. A child who loves football reads about football. A child who loves space reads about space. A child who loves horses reads about horses. At exactly the right level. Every time.

I built it because Ryan deserved better than the gap. Every child like Ryan deserves better than the gap.

I just wish I had had it fifteen years ago.