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It is perhaps a comment on the primary and secondary sectors of education in the UK that at least once a year, often more frequently, a new publication will issue forth on How to study effectively, aimed at adults and higher education students. A charitable interpretation would be that study skills, as all others, need brushing up from time to time, especially when a novel learning challenge is being tackled. An uncharitable one would be that in spite of the amoung of reading, writing and examination‐taking going on earlier in the system, teachers are failing to make explicit to pupils how to do more effectively what they are doing all the time. Certainly with our own small sample of five offspring at assorted schools, we seem to have to be perpetually pointing out the difference between the contents of a book and its index; how to get notes into some semblance of order for examination swotting; or how comparing differs from contrasting.