"It is imagination, above all, that drives learning forward." With the eloquence and insight always associated with his work, Michael Armstrong considers how to recognise children's imaginative achievement: how to observe it, interpret it, value it and promote it. The child's exemplification of the power of the imagination demands our respect, but more explicitly our attention. It is this closeness of attention that marks out the act of interpretation as the polar opposite to standard assessment procedures that dominate educational practice on both sides of the Atlantic at the present moment. There could not be a better moment to reassert the primacy of the imagination in the process of learning and the value of interpretation in the business of teaching.