Educational planners are nowadays expected to have a firm grasp of educational psychology, to know a good deal about the sociology and economics of education, and to be perfectly at home with quantitative data and statistical results. But even all this is no longer enough: they will soon have to add mathematics to their other accomplishments, if Math ematical Models in Educational Planning 1 is anything to go by. Operations research, systems analysis, control theory, linear programming, indeed, mathematical models of all kinds, are clearly becoming part of the toolkit of educational planners. Perhaps not tomorrow, but certainly the day after tomorrow. One can imagine the outcry that this expansion of intellectual efforts will engender in educational circles, hints of which are to be found in the last essay of the book under review. The volume before us is a collection of papers that were presented at a meeting of model builders, convened by OECD in March 1966, together with an introductory chapter by Professor Richard Stone attempting to summarise the consensus of opinion that emerged from the discussions. The papers themselves are a mixed bag. There is a long paper by Hector Correa, "A Survey of Mathematical Models in Educational Planning", which succeeds better in reviewing the types of notation that might be employed in mathematical models of education than in surveying the models as such. There is a straightforward exposition of some relatively simple projection models of the Swedish educational system by the Forecasting Institute of the Swedish Central Bureau of Statistics. This is followed by a much more high-powered presentation of a Markov chain model of the Norwegian educational system by Tore Thonstadt. The next paper, by Peter Armitage and Cyril Smith, " The Development of Computable Models of the British Educational System and their Possible Uses", descends from the stratosphere and manages to say more in its closing pages about the intrinsic difficulties of planning models in the field of education than all the rest of the book put together. The essay by Jean Benard, modestly entitled " General Optimization Model for the Economy and Education ", goes well beyond the educational system,