It's the most honest book I've read in a while about why our schools were built for a world that no longer exists, and what parents are quietly doing about it. Read it if you've ever stood at the school gate and thought "there has to be more than this," because it'll either give you the language to explain that feeling, or the nudge to actually do something with it.

A timely and important book that challenges outdated assumptions about education and offers a more human, inclusive, and future-focused vision for learning. Pick ’N’ Mix Education is thought-provoking, accessible, and full of practical ideas that will resonate strongly with parents and educators alike.

It is the first book I have read that just lays it all out: you have far more choices than you think. Whether you are happy with your school or quietly wondering, you will close it knowing what is actually out there.

Brilliant! I don't need a second sentence.

Ben and Steve take our hand, and guide us through the stepping stones of big educational theories and historical lessons-learned. They warmly nudge us along a reflective journey - providing detailed expert insights, paired with practical recommendations. 

This book has the integrity of authors who care deeply about young people's educational experiences, combined with the robustness of evidence-informed expertise and the wisdom of knowing what all this means in the classroom for both educator and learner.

Pick 'n' Mix is, on the surface, a guide for parents who want to make better choices about their children's education. But it is, underneath that practical ambition, something more interesting: a diagnosis of why a system that works perfectly is producing the wrong results. The industrial school was engineered to sort human beings into categories useful to an industrial economy. It did this extraordinarily well. The tragedy is that the economy it was built to serve has been dissolving for decades, and the system keeps sorting anyway, as if the factories were still waiting.

I was particularly struck by the treatment of human intelligence in the age of AI. The authors resist the temptation, which many writers on this subject cannot, to either dismiss the technology or surrender to it. Their argument — that AI exposes what schooling was never good at producing in the first place — is quietly devastating, and it resonated in me of Self Organised Learning Environments.

The book's second half, which profiles specific organisations offering alternatives to mainstream schooling, is admirably honest. Each case study is presented with the same structure: what it does, who it is for, how it works in practice, what it costs, and — crucially — who it is not for. This last element is unusual in a book of this kind, and it signals something important about the authors' intentions. They are not selling anything. They are making options visible so that parents can think in combinations rather than replacements. This is exactly the right frame.

If I have a reservation, it is this: the book occasionally underestimates how difficult it is for most families to exercise the choices it describes. The pick 'n' mix metaphor implies that the counter is always open, that you have money in your pocket and time to browse. For many children, neither is true. The authors acknowledge this, but perhaps not as forcefully as the problem deserves.

That said, this is a genuinely important book, and one I would recommend not only to parents but to anyone still trying to understand why a system so efficiently run continues to produce such strangely narrow human beings. The future of learning is not a curriculum. It is a conversation. This book is an excellent place to start one.

This book provides a hard hitting exposure of why our school system doesn't work for all. It also offers a sensitive analysis of how it could be made to work. Don't read it if you're convinced all is well in the school system. If you want a challenge coupled with some sound advice on ways forward, there are plenty of suggestions for you to consider and start the process of school transformation.