Thoughtful Society for Philosophical Enquiry

Wonder Wander is back – and we need YOUR questions 🚶‍♀️💭

It's our favourite kind of fundraiser: no medals, no blistered feet. Just people walking through their local streets, debating a philosophical question someone else has donated. We measure success in sore heads and hoarse voices.

Past questions have funded after-school philosophy clubs and online sessions for care-experienced young people – real impact, one wander at a time.

This year we want more questions from everyone: kids, parents, teachers, philosophers, and anyone who's ever wondered something out loud. What's yours?

Donate a question, and it could fuel a Wonder Wander somewhere in the UK this year 👇 https://forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=8iPkiBUA3EuLvvZRymN8dFcGqD_mUipDvA8L16ZjuUxUMFAwTjdHVVg5MDZTS0dYMkpMSkVFNUxESy4u&route=shorturl

Read the full story → https://www.thoughtful.org.uk/latest/wonder-wander-why-we-walk-and-talk-for-philosophy/ More about the project → https://www.thoughtful.org.uk/projects/wonder-wander/

Big news from the boardroom! This summer we welcomed two new trustees to Thoughtful – Luke Donnellan and Charlotte Pearce Cornish.

Luke is a philosophy graduate and former primary school teacher who spent over a decade making TV documentaries before training with The Philosophy Foundation to deliver P4C in the classroom. He's now Director of Understanding Humanism at Humanists UK, leading school speaker programmes and teacher training – and still can't resist dropping a philosophical question into dinner table conversation with his own kids.

Charlotte holds two Master's in Philosophy (Cambridge and Birkbeck), first inspired by reading Bertrand Russell. Over 15 years, she's founded and run consultancies working across education and skills, with clients from national government to schools and prisons, and has chaired the management committee of an Alternative Provision school.

Both bring exactly the mix of philosophical grounding and real-world experience we love at Thoughtful. Join us in giving them a warm welcome!

Read more about our trustees → https://www.thoughtful.org.uk/people/

“You can learn to live with aporia and be richer for it” Watson says. “It’s all about exposure – spending a lot of time confronting big unknowns”.

What's the strongest evidence for Philosophy for Children? It's not that it makes children better at tests – it's that it makes them better thinkers.

Two separate research reviews (2018 and 2025), covering dozens of studies and thousands of children worldwide, both found the same thing: P4C has a strong, consistent effect on children's critical thinking – reasoning, questioning, and evaluating ideas – even when its effect on standardised reading or maths scores is much smaller.

That's exactly what philosophical enquiry sets out to do. Read more about the research behind P4C https://www.thoughtful.org.uk/about/p4c-research-evidence/

Book by tomorrow, July 21st, to get a place on our final Level One P4C course of the academic year (online, 4–6 August).

This from an international delegate this year: "It is a missing piece in our curriculum. It is a ready to go tool."

Level One Course - Thoughtful All Courses are booked and managed via our Arlo platform, clicking the button above will require you to register / login to an account on that site.

It’s nice to see our collaboration mentioned in the annual report.

This August, we're running our final Level One course of the academic year – and because it's fully online, it's a great fit for international school staff wherever you're based.

We've had 168 delegates from 40+ countries join us over the last year, including teachers at Globeducate schools.

One teacher told us: "Personally, it will give me the opportunity to be more flexible and enjoy the process of questioning before focusing on an outcome or concrete result."

Booking closes 21 July – find out more: https://www.thoughtful.org.uk/courses/level-one-course-4/

We do so much interesting work to widen access to philosophical education and thoughtful oracy, but our direct delivery with children and young people is often the most memorable.

Here's a new blog by Grace Lockrobin about a workshop she led for young people from Telford, as part of our partnership with the National Trust:

https://www.thoughtful.org.uk/latest/conversation_about_conservation/

Conversation about conservation - Thoughtful On a hot summer day in Shropshire, twenty teenagers from New Road Academy, a comprehensive school in Telford arrived at Attingham Park, an eighteenth-century Regency mansion set within 200 acres of parkland. Despite being less than half an hour from their school, it was a place they had never visite...

I was pleased to share Thoughtful - powered by - at this year’s