MASANAS Backs Auris Tech to Fund Reading in 10 Welsh Schools
Auris Tech Limited, the British company behind the children's reading platform Fonetti, has secured MASANAS, a philanthropic venture and investment company co-founded by award-winning entrepreneur Mark Sweeny, as the founding corporate sponsor of its school sponsorship programme. MASANAS will fund whole-school access for ten Welsh primary schools for five years.
The programme allows a business to fund 10 named schools to have Fonetti, at the same price the school would pay for it itself. Access covers the whole school with no cap on pupil numbers to use inside and out of school.
Auris Tech is a business with purpose, and that carries an obligation. It is accountable for results and those results are measurable. Every sponsor receives termly reporting from every school they fund, drawn from real reading data rather than anecdote. The sponsorship is not a grant and no part of it is a donation. It funds something a school already needs and does not have the money for.
Auris Tech also funds the National Read-Aloud Challengeoutright. The Challenge is free to families and schools alike, exists to counter the loss of reading skills over the long summer holiday, and has supported more than 35,000 registered children to date, who have read 3.5 million minutes between them.
The moonshot
Every year, around one in four children leave primary school in England without reading at the expected level for their age. Wales performs worse than the rest of the UK on international reading measures. Auris Tech's stated ambition, set by founder and chief executive Kim Antoniou, is to halve that figure within five years. The ten schools funded by MASANAS are the first corporate-funded cohort inside that programme, and the programme itself is national.
What the technology does, and why it is difficult
Fonetti listens to a child read aloud and responds in real time. It follows the words on the page, hears where the child stumbles, and helps them through it. In practice it means a child who has nobody at home to read with still gets read with, every day.
General purpose speech recognition is trained on adult voices and performs poorly on children. Auris built its own with the University of Edinburgh, led by Professor Peter Bell, using the largest known dataset of children reading aloud. The technology is patented in the UK, USA, Europe and India, and holds over 92% accuracy on children's oral reading including the miscues, hesitations and self-corrections that define how children actually read. More than 750,000 reading sessions have been logged on the platform to date.
For teachers, that produces word-level miscue and fluency data which is effectively impossible to capture by hand across a full class. Fonetti is used in school, in lesson time, alongside the teacher. Home access is an addition to that rather than a replacement for it.
EVIDENCE
Ibstock Junior School. Measured on the York Assessment of Reading Comprehension before and after a six-week intervention, one pupil premium child gained 3 years and 1 month in reading rate and 2 years and 8 months in comprehension, having previously read very little at all.
Sketchley Hill Primary School. The proportion of a Year 2 cohort of 81 pupils reading aloud at home rose from 12% to 79%, a six-fold increase.
How the schools are chosen
Every school in the programme is pre-qualified. Each has used Fonetti with its own children during the National Read-Aloud Challenge, the free summer reading initiative for families and schools founded by Antoniou and funded by Auris Tech, which has just closed at the end of its fourth year. Each has seen what it does for its own pupils and has asked to continue. The need is established before a sponsor is involved, and the only thing preventing these schools from taking it into the classroom is funding.
The pattern is a common one. Several hundred primary schools take part in the Challenge each year. In the survey run with families at the end of this year's Challenge, 88% of parents reported increased reading enjoyment in their children and 91% noticed increased reading confidence. Many of those schools then find there is no budget line to carry it into the classroom in September, having seen those results for themselves over the summer.
The ten schools are not being named at this stage. Fonetti operates in English, and the Welsh schools in this programme are English-medium.
"We have spent years building something that works and proving it in classrooms. What we have never had is a partner with the standing to put the argument to business. MASANAS going first, and going first for five years rather than one, changes what is possible here. Any business can do the same thing at the same price, and I would encourage them to."
Kim Antoniou, Founder and Chief Executive, Auris Tech
"The technology is there, the evidence is there and the results speak for themselves. Fonetti is helping more children read, building their confidence and giving teachers data they simply wouldn’t have the time to collect. What was needed was someone willing to make a proper commitment to getting it into more schools and giving it time to make a difference. That’s what we wanted to do."
Mark Sweeny, Founder and Chief Executive, MASANAS
The announcement comes in the 2026 National Year of Reading, delivered by the National Literacy Trust, of which Auris Tech is a partner.
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