Who are Crossbow Education?

... And why would you buy from us?

Crossbow Education Corp is the US subsidiary of the award-winning UK Company Crossbow Education Ltd, founded in 1993 by SEN teacher Bob Hext. Bob used to design resources for his dyslexic students because he couldn’t find what he was looking for on the market at the time, and found that other teachers wanted them too. Since then Crossbow has won three national and one international awards for their products and customer service. It remains a family business, which Bob and his wife Anne still run, employing 16 people. The US Corp was founded in 2008, and is a fully fledged American business, holding its own stock in Vienna VA, employing American personnel and paying US taxes.

What is our relationship with Phonic Books and DK?
The founder and the main authors of Phonic Books used to be SEN teachers and were customers of Crossbow before they started on their own publishing journey (and aren’t we all glad they did?). Crossbow was one of their very first distributors, both in the UK and the USA, and Bob and Anne have known them personally for over twenty years. Last year the company Phonic Books was sold to Dorling Kindersley (now part of Penguin Random House), but the same authors and artists still produce their lovely material. Because of the new relationship between Phonic Books and DK, Crossbow now has access to a wide range of publications which we are now gradually adding to our own selection - starting with the fabulous levelled Super Readers.

How did we get into colored overlay resources?
Bob and Anne designed the Eye Level Reading ruler in 2004, when we had the idea of putting an opaque strip (duo ruler) or a tracking line (plain ruler) across a tinted mini-overlay, and it has since spawned many copies - some quite good, some terrible. We started working with one of the leading researchers in the field, Prof Arnold Wilkins of Essex University, soon after that, to ensure that our work was in line with academic research. Our inexpensive little invention has done a lot to increase public awareness of visual stress and how easy it is to change a life by giving a child the right color to read through, and we are proud to be, directly or indirectly, behind so much reading success.

What's behind our name and logo?
The cross and the rainbow are symbols of the faith of the owners - broadly,"Christ died in my place" and "God keeps His promises."  We try to run the company in a manner that is true to our Christian principals, and we sincerely hope that this translates into a positive experience for you.