Post-COVID learning loss has left many students behind in reading. An innovative solution is empowering teachers with real-time assessment, targeted phonics support, and age-appropriate resources designed for Australian classrooms.
In an era where digital disruption is affecting nearly every aspect of life, it’s no surprise that classrooms are also undergoing dramatic shifts. Yet amid the noise of new technologies and evolving curricula, one truth remains: literacy is the cornerstone of learning.
For Dame Wendy Pye, founder of Sunshine Books and a pioneer in early education publishing, that truth drives her company’s newest innovation. Launched this year, the Reading Road AI Tutor merges print and artificial intelligence to support Australian students struggling to read.
This new literacy tool offers a realistic solution to one of education’s most pressing post-COVID challenges: how to get older primary students back on track after disrupted schooling in their early years.
Sunshine Books began as a modest Australian publishing house 40 years ago. Today, it’s a global player in early learning, with more than 2,300 titles distributed worldwide and a digital footprint that reaches classrooms from Turkey to China. Yet the company remains grounded in its original mission of supporting the reading journeys of young children – particularly those at risk of falling behind.
“I’m still a print person – I’ve got ink under my fingernails,” Ms Pye says. “But I also know how powerful technology can be when it supports children and saves teachers time.”
While Sunshine Books has long offered digital programs alongside its printed materials, the recent pivot into AI represents a strategic leap. The decision was born of both opportunity and necessity.
COVID-19 and the urgency of intervention
The pandemic’s impact on learning outcomes is well documented. In Australia, students in Years 2–6 missed formative literacy milestones due to school closures, limited device access, and fragmented remote learning.
“Many of these kids are now 10, 11, 13 years old, and they can’t read fluently,” Ms Pye says. “You can’t just hand them a book aimed at five-year-olds and expect them to engage.”
That insight led to the development of the Reading Road series – a set of 50 fully decodable fiction and non-fiction books written for older struggling readers. The books are visually age-appropriate, include genres like mystery, drama, and adventure, and align with structured phonics instruction.
But the breakthrough wasn’t just in the books. The real game-changer came with the launch of the Reading Road AI Tutor, a first-of-its-kind platform tailored to Australian English and the Australian curriculum.
Designed as a companion to the print series, the AI Tutor operates in three phases after the student has read a printed Reading Road title:
Read: The student reads and records a passage given from the book. The AI Tutor listens, assesses reading competency, and provides an immediate rating out of five stars.
Practise: The AI Tutor then highlights up to 10 focus words that the student struggled with and offers opportunities to rehearse and re-record them, supporting word recognition and pronunciation.
Teacher Review: All data – audio, fluency ratings, and word-by-word performance – is sent to a teacher dashboard for review, giving educators real-time insights into each student’s progress.
Traditionally, assessing a student’s reading ability involves one-on-one sessions where the teacher listens, marks, and scores a child’s reading.
“What used to take hours – sitting down with every student, reading aloud, marking errors manually – can now happen quickly and objectively,” Ms Pye says.
“Teachers are time-poor. This tool gives them valuable feedback instantly, so they can focus on teaching.”
What’s striking about the AI Tutor isn’t just its functionality – it’s how much students enjoy using it. Many of the target users are disengaged readers but enthusiastic gamers.
“These kids think they’re just testing themselves against AI, but what they’re also doing is a high-level reading assessment,” Ms Pye explains.
After completing their session, students receive a printable certificate acknowledging their achievement. It’s a simple gesture that can have profound psychological benefits.
“For kids who’ve never succeeded academically, that certificate means everything,” she says. “It tells them: you’re a reader now.”
This reward system, combined with interactive activities and age-appropriate content, has already yielded results.
Built for the classroom
Reading Road AI Tutor was built with the classroom at its core. It integrates directly with a structured literacy approach widely used in Australian primary schools, and it complements rather than competes with curriculum-aligned phonics instruction.
A self-contained program with no access to generative AI, Sunshine’s solution was trained on its proprietary reading materials. That ensures both consistency in tone and fidelity to phonics pedagogy.
“We’ve trained the AI to understand the Australian phonics structure,” Ms Pye says. “It’s not American English, and it’s not off-the-shelf AI. It’s custom-built for our kids, our teachers, our classrooms.”
The tool currently supports Australian and Kiwi English, with British and American English options now being developed for international partners. Schools in China and Korea have already shown interest, validating the tool’s global potential.
For principals and school leaders navigating a post-COVID educational landscape, tools like the Reading Road AI Tutor serve a dual purpose of addressing literacy gaps and easing teacher workload.
As Ms Pye notes, “If you can’t read, you can’t navigate life. We have kids in high school who still can’t write job applications. We have to intervene earlier, and we have to do it in a way that’s engaging and scalable.”
The tool also provides school-wide data aggregation, enabling principals to monitor literacy trends across classrooms or year levels and identify where additional support may be needed.
With teacher shortages on the rise and behaviour management issues compounding in many communities, being able to delegate time-intensive assessment tasks to a reliable AI assistant offers not just convenience, but relief.
Sunshine Books is currently offering free access to the AI Tutor with every Reading Road purchase. Schools can request a sample pack of books before making a commitment.
According to Ms Pye, the response has been overwhelming. “Teachers are telling us, ‘this is exactly what we need. It’s simple, it works, and it doesn’t add to our already full plates’.”
As a business leader, Dame Wendy Pye has achieved global recognition, including being the first woman inducted into the New Zealand Business Hall of Fame and a celebrated Australian entrepreneur. But at her core, she remains a literacy advocate.
“Even now, after 300 million books sold, I still get up every morning hoping I can help one more child become a reader,” she says. “Because when a child says, ‘Listen to me, I can read this book’ – that’s everything.”
Learn more about the Reading Road AI Tutor at sunshinebooks.com.au or contact the Melbourne office at: info@sunshinebooks.com.au
