A career teaching English often with SEN teenagers inspired Emma Steel’s move to publishing books that empower everyone to fall in love with reading. Interview by Nicola Baird
Emma Steel is a keen reader, often cosying into a chair at home with a book to relax – something she remembers her mum doing too. Now with her own two young children she’s still a keen library user, believing that books and stories have always brought magic to the home.
“A lot of my fondest memories was with my mum telling me fairy tales, like the Three Bears, but she would change the ending. I remember once she told us about three bears that were going on holiday and then the next day we were going on holiday and it was a surprise.” But perhaps the biggest surprise in her bookish life is how she’s ended up as a publisher.
After 17 years as a teacher in special educational needs and disabilities, including 10 years with 14–19-year-olds at schools in the Midlands, Emma Steel was all too familiar with the difficult search for books that were accessible to learners with disabilities. “I would do what a lot of special needs teachers do, adapt the books for their class. And to make it easy to understand I might use symbols or different ways to access reading,” she explains.
As Emma moved her way up through education, taking on roles as curriculm manager and SENCO manager, for fun she created a picture book which she submitted to Leicester-based Sweet Cherry Publishing. The publisher invited her in for a chat and that’s how things changed forever.
“In typical teacher fashion I planned heavily for the meeting, and we ended up talking more about accessible reading than we did about the picture book. After that meeting, I sent a cheeky email to say, ‘if you were ever interested in somebody working for you and setting up some form of library for people to access reading with disabilities, here I am’.” A few days later she was offered a job to set up an imprint, Every Cherry.
“What Every Cherry have tried to do is make the reading experience easier.”
Emma Steel, head of Every Cherry
After a lot of reader testing Every Cherry launched in May 2024 aiming to make, “reading accessible for people with learning disabilities, or people who are learning English as a second language or anybody who may be able to read but might just need that little bit of a confidence boost to get there,” explains Emma sitting in front of a shelf of colourful books Every Cherry has recently published.
Some are super simplified versions of the classics – Shakespeare or Dickens – others are sensory board books. The aim is to meet readers where they’re at.
Sipping from her favourite pirate mug, Emma explains that: “One of the things that’s difficult in the SEN world is categorising by age, because somebody may be 21 but have the cognitive level of a five-year-old or a reading interest age of a 10-year-old. Some board books are designed specifically for younger children however when we do the classics, like King Lear or Frankenstein, which are aimed at older readers (9 to 12 reading age), we have found that we get a lot of young adults reading these (or even older adults that are 25 plus) who want to read the classics and have finally got a way to do that because of the format that we use.”
Along with rules to divide the written lines and pictures to help illustrate the story, the Every Cherry books often have symbols (eg, a picture of a door) to help comprehension.
For Emma this was a logical design change.
“What I want the National Year of Reading to be is a celebration of reading for everyone, whatever reading means to them and meeting people where they are. When you go into a clothes shop hopefully you find the size that fits you and I hope that people with any disability or any approach to reading can find a book that fits them.”
Emma Steel, head of Every Cherry
“In the SEN world, symbols are used as a form of communication. For somebody who struggles to speak or to hear, symbols can be used as a way to communicate. So initially, when a young person is using symbols they’ll understand that a symbol represents a word. For example, if I handed you the symbol of coffee that would mean ‘I’d like a coffee please’ and then slowly that exchange becomes a communication interaction with cause and effect. In the classrooms I taught in we’d symbolise recipes, instructions and day-to-day timetables.”
But what was lacking were these symbols included in print books, and that’s where Every Cherry comes in.
Our interview is over Zoom but Emma is able to show me how in Frankenstein every symbol represents a key word in the sentence. There is some flexibility in how these symbols look worldwide, but Every Cherry has standardized them, just like a house style. “The idea is that when a young person is reading, the illustrations and the symbols all come together so that a reader can clearly understand what’s happening. The lines as well help readers so that they can break reading down into smaller chunks, which also helps with dyslexia. And the sentences are very short, and really easy to understand. We try to avoid similes and metaphors because they can be quite confusing for our audience. This abridged version of Frankenstein tells the same story, but in a way that meets our readers where they are, rather than expecting them to understand the classic, which can be a challenge for a lot of people.”
With books that can be used for whole class sessions like Frankenstein there are also different versions to further help young people read. Cleverly the design is synchronised to assist teachers with their scaffolding. So if as a teacher you want to talk about content on page 77 each version matches. The price is the same too, £6.99 because Emma says, “why should a symbol reader have to pay more for a book?”
Just as the adapted classics (from creepy horror to sci-fi to Great Gatsby) are proving popular in classrooms, Every Cherry is finding the sensory board books are popular in libraries both for pre-schoolers and anyone with profound or multiple learning disabilities.
“These readers may never be able to read words or symbols. However, they can enjoy books through sensory storytelling adventures like Step Into Spring. You collect what you need to read the story and then on each page you can engage one of the five senses to explore the book. Quite a few libraries have created their own sensory bags so they can be really great for disability and for preschool. Libraries have done quite a lot of workshops using these books and they’re great to get parents reading with children in a more engaging and tactile way,” she says sharing how she’s planning to taking the pressure off by losing herself in Christmas Hallmark romances during December.
This love of books, and Emma’s understanding about the needs of SEN children is what’s helped shape the Every Cherry ethos. It may be just 18 months old but there are already many titles for children to touch, read with the help of symbols or listen to (all books have QR codes to access other formats). Some may fit into the KS3 and KS4 curriculum but many also help model what young people might meet on a treat, like A Day at the Beach or a Trip to the Zoo.