The desperate need for staff to brush up their own skills was highlighted after a school in Ipswich, Suffolk, had to hire a proof reader to catch spelling mistakes.
The literacy course shows both teachers and secondary pupils how to break down words to decode their meaning and spell them correctly.
Katy Parkinson, who developed Sound Training For Reading, said: “For many teachers, their training has not taught them to teach literacy as the school inspectors Ofsted expect.
“Many will have missed this themselves at school and then didn’t get taught how to decode words by breaking them down into their individual parts at training college.
“It is so wrong that they haven’t been taught it as a child and then they are being inspected on it in their teaching.
“This course is very intensive, usually for four pupils at a time. It is usually for pupils who have reached secondary education with literacy skills not quite as good as they should be.
It is so wrong that they haven’t been taught it as a child and then they are being inspected on it in their teaching
“We show how to break a word down into its component parts. Take a word such as transportation: trans means across; port, to carry, and the ‘tion’ sound as a suffix meaning the process of carrying across.”
Mrs Parkinson added: “All teachers, no matter what their subject, are expected to teach literacy across the curriculum and many find this very difficult, having specialised in their own subject maybe for years.
“Many have told me that my online resource has taken the panic away from teaching literacy.”
The specialist reading teacher is based at Middlesbrough’s DigitalCity Business offices where she developed the 13-year-old programme.
It is used in more than 200 schools across England.