Emma Hartnell-Baker, often known as Miss Emma, is a British education innovator, teacher, and doctoral researcher specialising in word mapping and early literacy development.
 

She is a dual UK–Australian passport holder and has worked extensively in both England and Australia. Emma continues to support schools in Australia while leading innovation and research in the UK.
 

Emma is known for developing the Speech Sound Pics (SSP) Approach and for creating the world’s first bi-directional word mapping technology, funded by Innovate UK. Her platform, MyWordz®, which includes MySpeekie®, is designed to Show the Code by making the structure of words visible and audible, supporting children to become independent readers and spellers. Her company, The Reading Hut, is the publisher of the Village with Three Corners series, designed to get young children excited about reading for pleasure and with increasing independence.
 

Her work focuses particularly on children who struggle with one-size-fits-all phonics instruction, including those with dyslexia, speech and language needs, and other neurodivergent profiles. She shows parents and teachers how to analyse dyslexic students when they are reading and writing, to pinpoint exactly what is blocking them from reading with fluency and comprehension, and from spelling with ease. 

Because Miss Emma makes the code fully visible and anchors mapping tightly to the child’s own speech, phonemic awareness strengthens and the bonding between speech, spelling and meaning accelerates. There is less need for the levels of repetition seen elsewhere because representations stabilise earlier.
 

Across both the UK and Australia, Emma’s mission has remained the same: every child should be able to learn to read and spell as quickly, clearly, and confidently as possible. She is one of the few educators who guides parents from birth onwards, showing how early speech, language, and communication development naturally lays the foundations for reading and spelling success. Her work helps families understand that literacy doesn’t begin at school, it begins with how children hear, process, and use spoken language from the very start.