A question not discussed often enough in school staffrooms is ‘what are we all doing here?’ The purpose of schooling is one of those rarely-visited assumptions: we all think we share the same mission but, on closer examination, those assumptions can frequently differ widely. In Valerie Hannon’s* new book, Thrive: Schools Reinvented For The Real Challenges We Face the case is powerfully made that the point of schools is to create thriving societies: “education has to be about learning to thrive in a transformative world.” In the following 150 pages she takes the broadest of overviews, forensically analysing the scale …