Blog · Typography for children
Sassoon Primary font for children with dyslexia
Most fonts a dyslexic child meets at school were designed for adults and then shrunk down. Sassoon Primary was designed the other way around. Rosemary Sassoon spent years sitting with primary-school children, asking them which letterforms they could read most easily and watching their eyes when they couldn't. The typeface that came out of that work has been a fixture of British primary classrooms for thirty years, and it is one of the small number of fonts genuinely built for young, still-learning readers. Here is what it actually does, where it helps a dyslexic child, and where it does not.
The short answer
Sassoon Primary is a strong default for children aged roughly 4 to 9 who are still building letter-shape knowledge - including, but not only, dyslexic learners. It uses letterforms close to the ones children are taught to write, generous internal counters, and small exit strokes that hint at handwriting flow. Most children find it warmer and easier to decode than Comic Sans, Arial, or Times.
It is not a substitute for the spacing, size, and contrast adjustments that matter most. A dyslexic child reading 11-point Sassoon on a glossy worksheet will struggle. The same child reading 16-point Sassoon with 1.5 line spacing on cream paper will not.
Who designed Sassoon Primary, and why
Rosemary Sassoon is a British typographer and educator whose doctoral work was on children's handwriting. In the late 1980s she became frustrated that the typefaces children met in their reading books bore almost no relationship to the letters they were being taught to write. A child practising the loop on a lowercase a in their handwriting book would then open a reading book and see a two-storey "a" with no loop at all. Two different shapes, same letter, taught in the same week.
Sassoon designed the family that bears her name to close that gap. She interviewed and observed primary-aged children in British schools, narrowing in on which letter shapes they could decode fastest, where they slowed down, and which forms confused them. The published Sassoon family - Primary, Infant, Sans, Book - came out in 1995 and has been licensed into UK and Commonwealth school materials ever since.
Two design choices fall out of that work and matter for dyslexic readers in particular.
What makes Sassoon Primary different
Handwriting-style letterforms with exit strokes
Look at a lowercase n in Sassoon Primary and you will see a small flick on the bottom right - the place a child's pen would lift off and begin the next letter. The same flick appears on m, h, l, i, t, u. These are called "exit strokes" or "outstrokes" and they do two quiet things at once. They tie each letter visually to the next, helping the eye track left-to-right within a word. And they match the shapes the child is already drawing in their handwriting book, so the cognitive bridge between "letter I'm writing" and "letter I'm reading" is shorter.
Open counters and distinct letter shapes
The bowls of a, e, o, g, p, q, b, d stay generous and open even at small print sizes. The lowercase a is a single-storey form (one loop, like the handwritten "a") rather than the two-storey form most adult fonts use. The single-storey a is consistently easier for young readers, and dyslexic children in particular benefit from the larger, simpler shape. The same is true of g: Sassoon uses the open single-storey "g" rather than the closed double-loop form.
Letters that get confused in dyslexia - b and d, p and q, n and u, m and w - are not just mirror flips of each other in Sassoon. Their entry and exit strokes are different, so the shape signals direction even when the bowl alone does not. It is not magic and it does not eliminate reversals, but it gives the visual system an extra hook.
The demo above uses Atkinson Hyperlegible as a stand-in (Sassoon is a paid licence so we cannot embed it on a public webpage). The principle is the same: notice how single-storey a and the slightly differentiated b/d and p/q change the feel.
Sassoon Primary vs the alternatives a school usually has
Most UK primary schools default to one of four fonts: Sassoon, Comic Sans, Arial, or whatever the worksheet generator chose. Each has a logic; only two of them were designed for children.
| Font | Designed for children? | Strengths | Watch-outs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sassoon Primary | Yes | Handwriting-style letters, exit strokes, open counters, single-storey a/g. | Paid licence; not free on the web. |
| Comic Sans | No (designed for software speech bubbles) | Open shapes, single-storey a, ubiquitous on Windows. | Inconsistent letter widths; some letters cramped at small sizes. See our deep dive. |
| OpenDyslexic | For dyslexic readers (any age) | Free, weighted bottoms reduce flipping, child-friendly proportions. | Distinctive look some children dislike; research is mixed. |
| Lexend | For readers of all ages | Generous letter spacing tuned for reading speed. | Two-storey a; less child-like in feel. |
| Arial | No | Universal, neutral, predictable. | Two-storey a; I/l/1 identical; closed letters. |
If you can pay for Sassoon and the child is under 9, it is usually the strongest first choice. If you cannot, OpenDyslexic at a slightly larger size gives a child many of the same benefits for free, and the family includes specifically designed forms for b/d/p/q. Sassoon and OpenDyslexic do different jobs - Sassoon bridges from handwriting; OpenDyslexic works on shape disambiguation - and a child who responds well to one may not respond as strongly to the other.
What the research actually shows
Direct comparative studies of Sassoon Primary are limited and most of them are small. The published work that exists, much of it from UK education departments and dyslexia charities, points in the same general direction:
Young readers generally rate Sassoon as easier and more comfortable than Arial, Times New Roman, and Century Gothic. Reading-speed differences in controlled tasks tend to be small (a handful of words per minute), but error rates - particularly on b/d confusions and on first-pass word identification - are consistently lower with Sassoon than with adult-targeted serifs.
For dyslexic readers specifically, the gains are larger than for typical readers, but the spread is wide: some children gain a lot, some none. This is the same pattern seen with OpenDyslexic and Lexend. Font choice is one variable, and rarely the dominant one. Size, spacing, contrast, and reading load matter more on average than which dyslexia-friendly font is in use.
The honest summary, then, is that Sassoon Primary is a strong default but not a treatment. Treat it as the floor you build the rest of the reading environment on, not the thing that does all the work.
How to use Sassoon Primary well
Get the size right first
For children aged 5 to 7, set body text at 16-18 point on screen and 14-16 point on paper. For 7-9 year olds, 14-16 point on screen, 12-14 point on paper. The rule of thumb: if you can see the exit strokes clearly from normal reading distance, you are in the right range. Children should not have to crowd the page.
Open the spacing
Set line height to 1.5 to 1.6 - significantly more than a Word default. Letter spacing can stay neutral; Sassoon's letterforms already breathe. Word spacing matters more for young readers than it does for adults, so do not justify text (justified text variously squeezes or stretches the word gaps and makes line-by-line reading harder). See line spacing and letter spacing for dyslexia for the full reasoning.
Choose a kind background
Pure white at full brightness is the harshest possible setting for a young reader. Cream, very pale yellow, or pale blue paper or page background reduces visual stress for many children. Our piece on background colours for dyslexia covers which tints help which children.
Avoid all-caps and italic for body text
Sassoon's strength is in its lowercase letterforms. ALL-CAPS PARAGRAPHS lose the shape information that the design is built around, and italic Sassoon is significantly harder for early readers than upright. Keep both for short titles or emphasis only.
Print on matt, not glossy
Glossy paper reflects classroom and home-office lights into the child's eye, creating glare hotspots that interrupt reading. Matt or uncoated paper is almost always more comfortable. The same principle on screen: dim the display, switch on warm-tinted "night shift" mode, and avoid direct overhead lighting.
Where Sassoon Primary falls short
Three honest limitations.
It costs money. Sassoon Primary is a commercial typeface from Club Type and Adobe, and licensing it for school use, or for embedding on a public website, is not cheap. Free families like OpenDyslexic, Lexend, and Atkinson Hyperlegible are genuinely good alternatives, especially when budget is tight.
It is age-bounded. The handwriting-style cues that help a 6-year-old start to feel patronising to a 10-year-old, and look childish to a 13-year-old. Children who have moved past phonics-stage reading often do better in a more "adult" face like Lexend or Atkinson Hyperlegible. Sassoon's job is the bridge years, not the whole journey.
It does not solve attention or working-memory issues. A child whose primary difficulty is sustaining attention across a paragraph will get more from reading-attention tools like reader mode, bionic reading-style prefixing, or paced text. Sassoon helps with decoding, not with focus.
Sassoon Primary in the browser
Most school websites, reading platforms, and homework portals use whatever font the developer chose, and there is no way for a child to switch fonts page by page. That is the gap LexiFont fills. LexiFont is a Chrome extension that lets you set a single reading font and applies it to every site the child visits - school portals, news articles, story sites, homework PDFs displayed as HTML. LexiFont Pro ships with Sassoon Primary alongside OpenDyslexic, Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, and Comic Neue, so a parent or SENCo can pick the family that fits the child rather than the family the website happened to choose.
If a child reads on a school iPad rather than a Chromebook, the equivalent move on iOS is to install Sassoon as a system font (there are vendor apps that do this) and then set the iPad's Reader View font preference. The same principle applies: pick the font once, apply it everywhere.
For teachers and SENCos: a worksheet recipe
If you are producing worksheets for a class that includes one or two dyslexic readers, the cheapest single change is to standardise on Sassoon Primary at 14 point with 1.5 line spacing on cream or off-white paper. That recipe alone, applied consistently across maths, reading, and topic worksheets, removes a meaningful amount of friction for dyslexic learners without making the materials feel different from what their peers receive. Save bold for headings; use it once per page, not as a body weight (see font weight and dyslexia for why).
For displays and reading walls, go bigger: 18-24 point Sassoon, with one idea per panel. Children should be able to read displays from across the room without leaving their seats.
The takeaway
Sassoon Primary is rare among typefaces in that it was actually designed by watching children read. That origin is the reason it works, and the reason it is age-bounded - it is a children's typeface, not a universal dyslexia font. For young dyslexic readers in the bridge years between learning to write letters and reading fluently, it is one of the strongest defaults you can pick. Pair it with the right size, spacing, and background, and it stops being a font choice and starts being a reading environment.