Uncertainty is a fact of life. You can never know enough to make perfect decisions. Understanding this helps us balance an awareness of our tendency towards overconfidence with an acceptance of our own fallibility.
The book discusses two opposed models of school improvement: the deficit model (which assumes problems are someone's fault) and the surplus model (which assumes problems are unintended systemic flaws). By aligning ourselves to a surplus model we can create a system of Intelligent Accountability.
The principles that make this possible are trust, accountability and fairness. While we thrive when trusted, unless someone cares about - and is holding us to account - for what we do, we're unlikely to be our best. Some teachers deserve more trust and require less scrutiny than others, but in order to satisfy the demands of equality we end up treating all teachers as equally untrustworthy. The more we trust teachers, the more autonomy they should be given. To pursue a system of fair inequality we must accept that autonomy must be earned.
What do we think?
A thought-provoking book that challenges traditional approaches to accountability in teaching in a well written and easy to follow format.
The chapters
David Didau's own overview of the book summarises seven chapters:
- Embracing ignorance: decisions are always made with incomplete knowledge, and overconfidence distorts them.
- The surplus model of school improvement: teachers are a scarce resource to nurture; the surplus model assumes good intentions and looks for causes rather than blame.
- Trust: trustworthiness rests mainly on honesty and expertise.
- Accountability: poor accountability adds workload and pushes teachers to look good rather than be good.
- Equality, fairness and autonomy: autonomy should grow with trust and be earned in ways teachers understand; leaders should keep judgement-based matters open to negotiation.
- Improving teaching: he argues that neither pupil outcomes nor lesson observation reliably identify the best teachers, and presents instructional coaching as a good bet.
- Intelligent leadership: remove extraneous demands on teachers and be wary of metrics ("when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure").
He sets three conditions for accountability to be "intelligent": teachers know in advance how they will be held to account; they do not know the views of those judging them beforehand; and they believe those judging them are well informed and care about accuracy.
Who it is for
Headteachers, senior leaders and trust leaders reviewing how they quality-assure teaching: lesson observation, work scrutiny, data and appraisal. Chapter 6's argument about the reliability of observation judgements is the most directly relevant to a monitoring calendar. The views are the author's, and the DfE's education staff wellbeing charter is a useful companion when reviewing workload from monitoring.
About the book
- Author: David Didau, who writes the Learning Spy blog.
- Publisher: Hachette UK. Paperback, on sale 6 November 2020.
- ISBN: paperback 9781913622275; ebooks 9781913808730 and 9781913808723; audiobook 9781036004156.
Sources: David Didau's overview of the book and Hachette UK listing, checked 13 October 2026.