our story
It started with teenagers who couldn’t write a paragraph.
I’m Ambreen. I’ve been teaching since I was seventeen. FunFox exists because of a problem I kept hitting with high school students, which turned out to have started years earlier.
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WHAT I KEPT SEEING
They could talk about a text brilliantly. Then freeze on the page.
Ideas, no structure
Essays that were a series of observations with nothing holding them together.
Six openings, none finished
Rewritten, rubbed out, and
abandoned.
"I don’t know how you’re supposed to say it"
They weren’t short of things to say. Nobody had shown them how to build it.
I was patching a hole in Year 9 that had opened somewhere around Year 3.
SO I WENT LOOKING
Writing isn’t taught badly in primary school. It’s barely taught at all.
5 hrs
Recommended writing time per week (AERO)
Under 2 hrs
What most primary teachers report actually spending
88 min
Spent weekly on spelling
35 min
Spent weekly on planning a piece of writing
Spelling and grammar are easy to mark, so they get taught. Planning, structuring, revising, the actual work of writing just doesn’t get the time it needs.
Source: national survey of 310 Australian primary teachers, Edith Cowan University, 2022.
HOW IT ACTUALLY WENT
Six years, and a lot of things that didn’t work.
Before Any Of It
Tutoring at seventeen.
Then a leadership training business out of university, textiles, pet products on Amazon. The businesses came and went. The teaching never stopped.
Teaching high school students around a folding table with a whiteboard.
Long before FunFox had a name.
A preschool program.
Worksheets and materials posted to families’ homes, made in the spare room and packed at the kitchen table.
30 children. Free. Four weeks. It took twelve.
Badly underestimated how long a skill takes to stick. Everything about how we space content now comes from that overrun.
Everything still on paper, still posted, still packed by hand.
Badly underestimated how long a skill takes to stick. Everything about how we space content now comes from that overrun.
No more posting folders.
Interactive modules, faster marking, and children writing on a keyboard for the first time.
Our students are invited to meet Her Majesty Queen Camilla.
Patron of the Royal Commonwealth Society, in recognition of their writing.
WHAT WE KEPT
The parts that survived.
No right time to join
Every term is complete in itself. There’s no correct moment to start.
There’s only sooner.
Every term stretches further
Each of our terms goes further than the last, on purpose. Capable kids deserve to find out they can do something difficult.
Fun is structural, not decoration
Games, competitions, points, a mascot. Some builds intrinsic motivation, some is frankly extrinsic. Both matter to a nine-year-old on a Tuesday afternoon.
Typing, because that’s how they’ll write
Australian primary classrooms give keyboard skills about nine minutes a week on average. Our students write the way they’ll write for the rest of their lives.
WHAT EVERY CLASS DOES
Our Method
01
Foundations
Teach each technique explicitly, one at a time, before asking for any writing.
02
Practice with Purpose
Work aimed at that exact skill, in groups of six small enough that a teacher can watch every page as it fills.
03
Feedback
One strength, one next step, every week. About the method, not the marks.
WHO BUILT IT
FunFox is run by four siblings.
Ambreen
Founder & CEO
Double Master’s in Educational Leadership and TESOL. Leads the teaching team and owns the curriculum.
Mahek
Co-founder
Runs operations and heads the academic counselling team. Who you’ll speak to when you’re working out what your child actually needs.
Nasreen
Co-founder
Leads the tech team and runs the platform every class and module runs on.
Taha
Co-founder
Finance. Which sounds like the least interesting job here, and is the reason the business can continue to exist.
WHO BUILT IT
Nazneen has been a teacher her whole life. She still teaches here.
Our mum. She’s in her sixties and one of the most experienced people on our team.
If you want to know where the FunFox teaching style comes from, it comes from her kitchen table. The patience with a child who isn’t getting it yet. The refusal to move on until they do.
The assumption that any child can do the hard thing if you show them how, properly.
We didn’t set out to build a family business. We just wanted people around us who cared about it as much as we did, and it turned out they were already at the dinner table.
IT'S NOT JUST US ANY MORE
Four of us started it. Around fifty of us run it now.
Teachers, tech, operations, marketing. Across enough time zones to teach a child in Dubai and a child in Parramatta on the same day, to the same standard. Different jobs, one question in every meeting: is this actually working for the child?
OUR TEACHERS
Meet the Teachers
Ambreen
Nazneen
Mahum
Amna
Mariam
Summaiya
Eman
Bredly
Clarisse
Zahidun Nisa
Mika Praxedes
Norielle Menez
Joanna Mae Hadap
Praticia Zuluaga
Start with one free class.
See what your child does with a teacher who can watch the page as it fills.