Product reviews for Pick N Mix Education

I've spent five years building a school for children the system failed. Ben Whitaker and Steve Hope have spent a decade arguing for why that was necessary

I built MVA (Minerva Virtual Academy) because the families coming to me had run out of road with the traditional system. Five years and 2500 students later, I'm still receiving calls from parents who've been told their child is the problem, when the problem is the design. Pick 'n' Mix Education is the book I wish those parents had read first. Ben Whitaker and Steve Hope don't waste time being polite about the state of education. They go straight to the uncomfortable truth: the system isn't broken. It was built this way - for sorting, not for learning - and it is working exactly as designed. The question is whether we are willing to build something better.

This book argues, convincingly and practically, that we already can. It gives parents the language, the confidence, and the tools to stop waiting for a system that was never designed with their child in mind, and to start building something that actually is. The Woolworths analogy is one of the best opening arguments I've read in any education book. But it is the practical chapters - the real options, the honest trade-offs, the case studies that show what is already working - that make this genuinely useful rather than merely satisfying to read.

Every parent who has ever sat in a meeting and been told to be patient with a system that is failing their child should read this. It won't just change how they think about school. It might just change what they do next.