Rebuilding a phonics platform in time for the new school year

The challenge

Supersonic Phonic Friends publishes a systematic phonics program used across UK primary schools: lesson sequences, teaching resources and the printable material that goes with them. Teachers use it mid-term, with a class waiting.

The old site had plenty of content but made it hard to find. There was also a fixed deadline, because schools buy a phonics program in the summer and use it from the first week of September.

What we did

We agreed the running order with the client before writing any code. Schools notice findability first, so navigation and search went first. They shipped well ahead of launch, which meant they had real use behind them before the term that mattered.

The old menu asked teachers to think in website terms. The new one uses the scheme’s own language. It opens into three linked columns that go from phase to group to individual sounds, and each sound has its own artwork so it can be recognized at a glance. Where a branch would only repeat itself, the column collapses. On a phone the same columns become a stack you step into and back out of.

Search is in the header on every page. Suggestions appear as you type, over a plain form that still works if the scripts don’t load. Results are split into lessons and resources, with a count on each, and the filters for year group, font style and resource type stay applied as you move between them.

To make that work we first had to fix the data underneath. Year groups and handwriting styles had been written into file titles as codes that only made sense to the person who typed them. We turned those into proper tags and backfilled the existing library automatically, so the team didn’t have to retype every title by hand.

After that came resource previews, so a teacher can see what they’re about to download, and a contact route that doesn’t need an email address.

Billing that matches how schools buy

A school doesn’t buy the way a consumer does. There’s a budget holder, a purchase order and an invoice, and the person choosing the resource is rarely the person approving the spend.

We moved the platform’s billing to match, with invoice and purchase order first and no automatic card renewal arriving without warning. It was more a commercial change than a technical one, and it removed a whole category of awkward conversations.

Hosting and infrastructure

The platform now runs on infrastructure described entirely in code: eleven separate parts, each with one job and each able to be recreated exactly. A managed firewall filters out unwanted traffic.

Moving the site with no downtime

The plan in June allowed for 20 to 30 minutes offline over a weekend. In the end we moved the whole site and its resource library across with no downtime, and no customer was affected.

Every release since has gone out the same way, with no downtime and nothing for schools to notice. When the database needed an upgrade in October, we allowed 15 minutes offline. It took 2 minutes 40 seconds and no customer reported a problem.

How we work with Supersonic Phonic Friends

Requests go into a shared channel and get an answer the same day. Changes ship on a regular cadence, and there’s a named engineer who knows the platform. An assessment tool is next.