About
Our name
Back in 1995, our founders Jenny and Steve were looking to open their own independent publishing house.
They attended a talk about starting a company – and the talk went into the reasons someone might want to start a company. One of the reasons was to be able to leave it to your children.
With no kids of their own back then they quipped ‘we’ll have to leave it to the cat’.
That is, Ransom – Jenny’s cat at the time.
(Love the name? Ransom the cat was later joined by Kidnap the cat!)
Our mission
Fast-forward a few years and Jenny and Steve were running Ransom Publishing, offering award-winning educational software.
But while at a schools show, one topic kept coming up…
Teachers were constantly asking if they did books for older kids who couldn’t read. Like, at all.
Moved by the stories they were hearing and passionate that literacy does not only unlock the wider curriculum but the very world around you, they decided to do something about it.
That ‘something’ was publishing Dark Man – a series of books to get seriously struggling teen readers 1) enjoying reading and 2) developing their literacy skills. (It’s still selling strong to this day, because it just works.)
Over 25 years later, Ransom is a leading literacy specialist with hundreds of books and resources to teach children to read (well) in the first instance or to change the trajectory of a literacy journey that’s blown off course.
We are truly proud of the list we have built, the impact our books have had in schools, homes, prisons, etc. – but we haven’t done it alone. Ransom works with a pool of highly skilled authors and illustrators and a vast network of SENCOs, teachers, librarians and specialists who offer invaluable advice/feedback from the front lines of teaching people to read.
Our specialisms
Reluctant and struggling readers
Our first specialism is books like the aforementioned Dark Man series i.e. books for people whose English reading age (which speaks to their reading ability) is lower than their actual age.
For example, a 12 year-old with the reading ability equivalent to that of the average six year-old. They may simply be a struggling reader, they might have dyslexia, or they might just be learning English as an additional language later in life…
Critically, the books we do are the right level for the reader – but the topic/content is still geared for their age group. In other words, they’re high interest, low ability (‘hi-lo’). After all, a 12 year-old doesn’t want to be reading about 6-year-old stuff!
And in the background these books, which cover all different interest-reading age combinations, are also helping to redefine the reader’s relationship with reading – and to further develop their literacy skills.
This involves special writing and special design.
Learning to read through phonics (then building fluency)
Our second specialism is materials specifically for the phonics pedagogy, which is used around the world for the very early stages of teaching someone to learn to read English.
So that’s resources to help teach phonics knowledge (ours have been validated by the UK Government’s Department for Education) and fully decodable books for students to put their phonics knowledge into practice.
Thanks to our work with reluctant and struggling readers, we know these students can be any age, so we have mainstream book ranges for phonics teaching/reading with 4-7 year-olds, but also catch-up ranges for 7 years all the way through to adult.
They are all infused with our unparalleled understanding of the phonics pedagogy plus, well, everything else we know about literacy – as reading is a lot more than just phonics knowledge.
On that note, we do also have products to move learners onto after phonics (for example, The Ransom Library for Years 2-6). These are very much designed to further build learners’ fluency/broader literacy skills and see them home to being a true ‘free reader’.
