Letter-join: Login, Fonts and Handwriting Scheme Explained

Letter-join is a whole-school handwriting scheme for Reception to Year 6, and this review is for the teachers and families who use it. It runs as a website, not an app. A school subscribes, and every child then uses it free at school and at home with a login the school gives out. To get in, go to letterjoin.co.uk and, next to Login at the top, click Desktop on a computer or Tablet on an iPad. It does not run on mobile phones.

This guide covers the logins, the fonts, the lesson modules for each year group, the price and how the scheme fits the Department for Education's writing framework. It also sets out what research says about teaching joined handwriting early. Handwriting sits beside reading in a school's literacy plan, so it links to our guide to reading comprehension strategies. Every fact about the product comes from Letter-join's own pages, checked on 24 September 2026.

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What is Letter-join?

Letter-join is made by Green and Tempest Ltd and describes itself as a whole-school handwriting scheme in line with the National Curriculum, as its homepage puts it. It combines screen and paper. On the screen are animations that model each letter and join, games for tablets and interactive whiteboards, and teacher tools. On paper are hundreds of worksheets, printed in the font each class uses.

For teachers, the core is a set of Lesson Planners in seven modules, one for each year from Reception to Year 6. Around them sit a Word Animator for making your own word animations, a Worksheet Generator, an online word processor, dictation exercises, phonics resources and a Handwriting Manual, posted in print to UK schools. There is also a Handwriting Recovery Programme for older children who need help and a Handwriting Assessment Tracker, all listed on the Letter-join features page.

It is a tool for teaching one skill well. It does not teach composition, and it will not replace a teacher modelling letters in front of the class. Its value is consistency: every class uses the same letter shapes, the same words for each movement and the same order of teaching.

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How do I log in to Letter-join?

At the top of every page on letterjoin.co.uk, next to Login, there are two buttons: Desktop and Tablet. Click Desktop on a PC, laptop or Mac, and Tablet on an iPad or Android tablet. Desktop opens the Desktop Login form, with boxes for Username and Password and a login button. Tablet opens a page that asks for your Tablet Username, with an Enter button. The site asks for a landscape screen, so turn a tablet sideways and widen a narrow browser window.

Three details catch people out. First, the child login is shared: every child uses the same username and password on a computer, then picks their class name. If the class is not listed, Free Play still works. Second, the tablet login uses a swipe code, a pattern drawn on the screen, instead of a password. On a laptop without a touchscreen, you can draw the code with the trackpad.

Third, the details belong to the school. Letter-join's help for home page tells parents to ask the school for a home log-in letter, which holds both sets of details. Some schools print their login on their own websites. We never repeat a school's details here, and neither should anyone else.

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Why is my Letter-join login not working?

• On a phone? Letter-join is for computers and tablets only, so move to a bigger screen.
• Right pair of details? Desktop and Tablet use different details: a Username and Password on the Desktop Login form, and a Tablet Username and swipe code on the Tablet page.
• Old browser? Use a current Chrome, Safari or Opera. Letter-join warns that Internet Explorer and Edge do not join cursive letters correctly (system requirements).
• A free trial password? Copy and paste it from the email so no spaces creep in, and check the junk folder if the email never came.
• Still stuck? Ask the class teacher. The school's administrator can see the current details on the admin page.

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Setting up Letter-join as a school

A subscription starts with a named administrator for the school. Letter-join's set-up advice points them to the admin page, where four things are decided: the school's preferred letterforms, the font downloads, the children's log-in details and the classroom information, including class names.

1. Agree the policy first. Decide the starting route, print or cursive, and the letterforms, before anyone logs in, because every worksheet follows those choices.
2. Name the classes clearly. Children pick their class from a list after logging in, so use the names they know, such as the class name on the door.
3. Send the home details privately. Use the home log-in letter, sent to families, rather than posting the details on a public page.
4. Brief staff with the manual. Each UK classroom account gets a printed Handwriting Manual, and a staff presentation on the site covers every feature for a training session.

A free trial can be shared with every member of staff, so a school can test the logins, the fonts on its own computers and the Lesson Planner samples before it buys. It is worth checking on the machines children actually use, because some browsers, such as Internet Explorer, do not join the cursive letters correctly.

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Which Letter-join font should my class use?

Each classroom account picks one Letter-join font, and that choice flows into the animations, games and printed worksheets. The standard font is Letter-join Plus, which is fully joined with a lead-in line on each letter. There is also Print Plus, a printed font that Letter-join says is in line with the DfE phonics guidance, for Reception and Year 1.

Between those two sit the in-between choices: joined or unjoined cursive, with or without a lead-in line. A school can also pick alternative shapes for f, k, w, x and z, and the choice applies to every class and every worksheet. The simplest arrangement is one route for the whole school, written into the handwriting policy. Letter-join supplies an editable policy template for this.

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How do I get the Letter-join font on my computer?

The fonts come only with a School Edition subscription, and only the school's administrator can download them, from the admin page. They work only while the subscription lasts. In Microsoft Word the joins appear correctly because Word supports a feature called contextual alternates, which swaps each letter's shape depending on its neighbours.

PowerPoint, Publisher, Smart Notebook, ActivInspire, Google Docs and Chromebooks do not have the contextual alternates function. For those, Letter-join supplies Letter-join Basic, which copies Letter-join Plus as closely as it can, as the Letter-join FAQs explain. The Home Edition does not include the fonts.

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What does each year group do in Letter-join?

The Lesson Planners run in seven modules, and the first three come in two versions to match a school's policy. Module 1 is for Reception, and Modules 2 to 7 follow Year 1 to Year 6. Letter-join also suggests how often to teach. Lessons are short and daily in the early years, then fewer and longer as children get older, according to its key stages page.

Choose a year group below to see the module, the rhythm Letter-join suggests, and what the DfE writing framework asks of that year.

One difference is worth noticing. Letter-join suggests three lessons a week in Year 2 and two a week from Year 3. The writing framework asks for daily teaching until a child can write legibly and easily (Department for Education, 2025). For a Year 2 child who still forms letters slowly, a few extra minutes of daily practice may matter more than the timetable in the planner.

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Worked example: a Year 1 letter family lesson

A Year 1 teacher is teaching the family c, o, a, d. She plays the Letter-join animation for c on the board, then writes it herself on a wide-lined flipchart, saying: "Start at the top, go round and stop." The class traces it large in the air, then writes a row on wide-lined paper while she watches the three children who most often start at the bottom. When one child forms o clockwise, she stops him, models it again beside his row, and watches him write two more before moving on. The lesson ends with the words cod, cad and dad, written from a dictated word, not copied.

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Worked example: a Year 4 joins lesson

A Year 4 teacher is teaching the horizontal join, which runs from letters such as r, v and w. She writes "ran", "van" and "wet" under the visualiser, naming the join as she goes: "along from the top, then into the next letter." The class then uses a sheet she made in the Letter-join Worksheet Generator with the same words, and writes one sentence from their science topic in joined writing. The success check is not neatness alone. She times one minute of copying at the start of the week and again at the end, so the class can see whether the join is making them faster.

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What are the letter families in handwriting?

Letter families are groups of letters that start in the same place and are formed in a similar way. Teaching them together means one movement serves several letters. The DfE framework lists typical families as c o a g q d; i l t k j; v w u y f; r n m h p b; and e s x z. It also notes that schemes group them slightly differently.

In Year 1, the national curriculum expects children to understand which letters belong to which family and to practise them. Letter-join introduces the families in Module 2 and has a Letter Families activity for practice on screen. If your scheme groups letters differently from the list above, follow the scheme, and keep the same families and the same words in every class.

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Diagonal and horizontal joins

The framework describes two basic joins. The diagonal join runs from the line up into the next letter, and letters such as a, d, g, c, o and q need an extra stroke back across the top. The horizontal join runs from the top of letters such as v, w, x, f and r across into the next letter. Our lesson card below puts the families and both joins on one page for the classroom.

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Should children learn joined handwriting from Reception?

This is the biggest choice a school makes with Letter-join, because the scheme supports both answers. Module 1 Print starts with printed letters and moves to joins later. Module 1 Cursive starts with pre-cursive patterns and continuous cursive, and aims for every lower-case letter to be formed and joined by the end of Reception.

The DfE writing framework, published in July 2025, leans one way. It says joined handwriting should not be taught until children form unjoined letters correctly and consistently. It also says there is no expectation that schools teach lead-ins from the start, though some schools do. Schools that keep lead-ins should also teach unjoined letters for labels, email addresses and algebra (Department for Education, 2025).

The research does not settle which script to start with. The evidence check below sets out what nine studies found.

The bar counts only the nine studies checked for this guide. Most were done in French, Italian, Spanish or Hebrew classrooms, where the scripts and spelling systems differ from English, and none tested Letter-join itself.

The strongest support for cursive first is an Italian trial. Semeraro et al. (2019) found that first-grade classes trained in cursive movements did better in writing and reading than control classes. Against that, Wolf, Abbott and Berninger (2017) found that a second year of print improved sustained handwriting more than switching to cursive. In Quebec and France, children taught cursive only knew fewer letters than those taught print or both (Bara et al., 2016).

What the research does show clearly is that teaching handwriting explicitly pays off, whatever the script. A meta-analysis by Santangelo and Graham (2016) found that handwriting instruction improved legibility (effect size 0.59) and fluency (0.63). It also improved the quality (0.84) and length (1.33) of children's writing. Motor instruction did not improve handwriting (0.10 for legibility and minus 0.07 for fluency).

That last finding is a useful caution for any scheme with plenty of patterns and warm-ups. Warm-ups have a place in Reception, and our guides to fine motor skills activities and Dough Disco cover them. But the meta-analysis suggests the time is better spent forming real letters, with a teacher watching, than on shapes alone.

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Why handwriting fluency matters for writing

Handwriting is not just presentation. When forming letters takes effort, a child has less attention left for ideas, words and sentences, which is a problem of cognitive load in the primary classroom. In an early trial, first graders who struggled with handwriting had 27 fifteen-minute sessions of extra handwriting teaching. They gained more in handwriting and in how fluently they wrote compositions than a control group, and the gains held six months later (Graham, Harris and Fink, 2000).

Larger studies point the same way. Across 4,950 primary children, handwriting fluency explained 7.4% of the difference in writing quality after other factors were counted (Skar et al., 2022). When second graders were taught handwriting rather than keyboarding, they wrote in longer bursts and produced longer, better stories (Alves et al., 2016).

This is why the framework wants handwriting lessons to use a pencil and paper, and why it warns against tracing and practice without supervision. Tracing dotted letters with no adult watching can let a child keep repeating a poor formation. In our view, Letter-join's screen tracing is most useful as a warm-up or for practice at home. The teaching itself belongs at a table, with the teacher modelling the writing first.

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What do teachers and parents say?

Teachers rarely post about handwriting schemes until someone asks. When a school leaders' account on X asked for recommendations in August, the replies named Letter-join and another scheme, Kinetic Letters, more than any others.

The same thread carried the strongest counter-argument. A retired head replied that 'insistent persistence' beats any scheme: decide how letters are formed, teach it the same way in every class, and expect children to use it. That fits the research above. The gains come from explicit, consistent teaching, and a scheme helps mainly by making consistency easier to keep.

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Letter-join for children with dyslexia or motor difficulties

Letter-join describes itself as an excellent resource for children with dyslexia, because it mixes seeing, hearing, moving and touching. That is the company's claim, and no published study has tested Letter-join with these children. The research on script choice is thin here too. One small Italian study found cursive helped children with dyslexia and handwriting difficulties, but not the other children tested (Arfé et al., 2020).

For a child whose handwriting stays slow or painful despite good teaching, the next step is not more worksheets. Our guides to dysgraphia and supporting learners with dyslexia set out what to look for, and when to involve the SENCO or an occupational therapist. The Handwriting Recovery Programme can support older children, but it is an intervention, not an assessment. Tools that promise multisensory learning still need to be checked against what each child can do on paper.

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How much does Letter-join cost?

As of September 2026, Letter-join's own price example is £396 plus VAT in the first year for 8 classroom accounts, then £296 plus VAT each year after. Prices change, so check the current figure on the Letter-join pricing page. That covers use on computers, whiteboards and tablets at school and at home, and the first year includes a registration fee. The calculator on that page gives a figure for any number of classrooms. Groups of three or more schools can ask for a discount, and schools outside the UK pay no VAT.

A family whose school has no subscription can buy the Home Edition, which costs £50 a year as of September 2026. It does not include the fonts, the Lesson Planners, the Handwriting Recovery Programme, the Assessment Tracker or the Home Learning Packs. Schools can also try the full site free for 30 days, without card details, through the free trial; the trial leaves out the fonts, the Lesson Planners and a few other extras.

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Is Letter-join worth it for a school?

The case for it is consistency and time. One subscription gives every class the same letter shapes, a planned sequence from Reception to Year 6 and worksheets in the right font, which is hard to build from free resources. The case against is cost, and the fact that the teaching that matters most happens at a table with pencil and paper. A skilled teacher with a visualiser, wide-lined paper and a clear policy can do that without a subscription.

If you are comparing literacy subscriptions, our reviews of Read Write Inc. Phonics, Oxford Owl and Spellingframe follow the same format. Letter-join's phonics section is designed to sit beside a school's phonics programme, not replace it.

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Limitations of Letter-join

Letter-join itself has not been independently evaluated in published research. The claims on its website, such as its value for dyslexia, are the company's own. The research on joined handwriting is mixed, mostly from other languages, and gives no clear reason to start cursive in Reception. Choosing Module 1 Cursive puts a school at odds with the DfE framework's preferred order.

There are practical limits too. Letter-join does not work on phones, and the fonts stop working when a subscription ends. Finally, a website cannot watch a child's pencil grip or the direction of a stroke. Only an adult beside the child can do that.

Start with your school's handwriting policy. Check which route it names, print or cursive, and whether every class uses the same font and the same family order. Then watch one handwriting lesson in each key stage with that policy in hand. Handwriting is one strand of a school's literacy work; our guide to reading comprehension covers the reading strand.

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Frequently asked questions

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Is Letter-join free?

For children, yes, when their school subscribes: home use is included. Otherwise it is paid, either by a school or through the Home Edition (£50 a year as of September 2026), and teachers can explore the full site for 30 days at no cost.

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Is there a Letter-join app?

No. There is nothing to download from an app store. Letter-join opens in a web browser, and the Tablet login gives the touch-screen activities on an iPad or Android tablet.

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Can I use Letter-join on my phone?

No. The company says it is not compatible with mobile phones. Use a laptop, desktop computer or a tablet of 8 inches or more, held sideways.

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What is a Letter-join swipe code?

It is the pattern a child draws on the screen to sign in on a tablet, in place of a password. The school sets it and hands it out with the tablet username.

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Does Letter-join teach cursive or print?

Both. Each class account chooses a font, from Print Plus to fully joined Letter-join Plus, and the Reception and Key Stage 1 modules come in a print-first and a cursive-first version.

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References

• Alves, R. A., Limpo, T., Fidalgo, R., Carvalhais, L., Pereira, L. A. and Castro, S. L. (2016). The impact of promoting transcription on early text production: effects on bursts and pauses, levels of written language, and writing performance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(5), 665 to 679.
• Arfé, B., Corato, F., Pizzocaro, E. and Merella, A. (2020). The effects of script and orthographic complexity on the handwriting and spelling performance of children with dyslexia. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 53(2), 96 to 108.
• Bara, F. and Morin, M.-F. (2013). Does the handwriting style learned in first grade determine the style used in the fourth and fifth grades and influence handwriting speed and quality? A comparison between French and Quebec children. Psychology in the Schools, 50(6), 601 to 617.
• Bara, F., Morin, M.-F., Alamargot, D. and Bosse, M.-L. (2016). Learning different allographs through handwriting: the impact on letter knowledge and reading acquisition. Learning and Individual Differences, 45, 88 to 94.
• Department for Education (2025). The writing framework. London: DfE.
• Graham, S., Harris, K. R. and Fink, B. (2000). Is handwriting causally related to learning to write? Treatment of handwriting problems in beginning writers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92(4), 620 to 633.
• Letter-join (2026). Frequently asked questions. Green and Tempest Ltd. Checked 24 September 2026.
• Letter-join (2026). Key stages. Green and Tempest Ltd. Checked 24 September 2026.
• Letter-join (2026). Features. Green and Tempest Ltd. Checked 24 September 2026.
• Morales-Rando, C., Pérez-Jorge, D., Strbová, L. and Ariño-Mateo, E. (2022). Manuscript vs cursive writing. Learning to write in primary education. Education 3-13, 50(7), 880 to 892.
• Morin, M.-F., Lavoie, N. and Montésinos-Gelet, I. (2012). The effects of manuscript, cursive or manuscript/cursive styles on writing development in Grade 2. Language and Literacy, 14(1), 110.
• Pulido, L. and Thériault, P. (2025). Manuscript and/or cursive: the contribution of research conducted since 2012 on handwriting instruction. Journal of Occupational Therapy, Schools, and Early Intervention, 18(1), 82 to 98.
• Santangelo, T. and Graham, S. (2016). A comprehensive meta-analysis of handwriting instruction. Educational Psychology Review, 28(2), 225 to 265.
• Semeraro, C., Coppola, G., Cassibba, R. and Lucangeli, D. (2019). Teaching of cursive writing in the first year of primary school: effect on reading and writing skills. PLOS ONE, 14(2), e0209978.
• Skar, G. B., Lei, P.-W., Graham, S., Aasen, A. J., Johansen, M. B. and Kvistad, A. H. (2022). Handwriting fluency and the quality of primary grade students' writing. Reading and Writing, 35(2), 509 to 538.
• Vaknin-Nusbaum, V. and Lahav, A. (2026). Does it really matter? The effect of script instruction on first graders' reading performance in Hebrew: typical versus at-risk readers. Learning Disabilities Research and Practice, 41(2), 143 to 155.
• Wolf, B., Abbott, R. D. and Berninger, V. W. (2017). Effective beginning handwriting instruction: multi-modal, consistent format for 2 years, and linked to spelling and composing. Reading and Writing, 30(2), 299 to 317.