I like the play on words in the title, not least because I get the impression that quite often "thinking aloud" is not allowed or encouraged – far better to keep one's head down and try to get through the week without being too adversely affected by the latest mad idea hatched by someone whose only educational credentials is that they went to school once.

Mick Waters' is the voice of common sense, but based on a career in education that has taken him from working in schools to the top leadership levels both locally and nationally.

This is one of those books that you can dip into rather than reading from the first chapter to the last. I found the chapter in assessment and the one on inspection especially illuminating, with the former explaining how it all went wrong, and the latter making the very sensible suggestion that schools should be judged simply as being either good enough or not good enough (for an explanation of why anything else is so confusing as to be pretty much worthless in my opinion, see Levels in Computing? I thought they'd gone!).

The book is well-structured, with each chapter setting out a particular issue, saying what has happened and why, and drawing on a range of educational research. Each chapter ends with a bullet-pointed section on what should be done.

This is an excellent book, and I highly recommend it for any teacher who wants to know more about what the research says and about what has gone wrong in certain areas, and why.

Thinking Allowed on Schooling (affiliate link)

This article is a slight amended version of one first published in the Digital Education newsletter.