Now, invariably, at any given time of day I always seem to have a few musical theatre lyrics running around inside my head, but I did not expect to leave the first day of the 2026 Assessment Horizons conference humming the musical brilliance of Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. However, I did, and it was all because of a wonderful keynote discussion between Amin Neghavati and Dr Simon Child: ‘Futures Thinking as a Teachable (and Assessable?) Capacity’, which posed, for me, one of the most thought-provoking questions of the day: can we measure imagination? I have always thought of imagination as the mind’s most beautiful capacity: the ability to form what is not yet real, to hold possibility before it becomes certainty, and to see beyond what is immediately in front of us. I will admit that I had never really considered measuring it.

When the question was raised, my mind went first to something optimistic and visible: the Imagineers at Walt Disney. Disney Imagineers, for those who are unfamiliar, is a collaboration of engineers, designers, writers and artists who build immersive worlds. These are theme parks and attractions in which imagination is not only represented but made physically navigable; story becomes space and ideas becomes environment. It is imagination translated into experience. But this immediately raised a further question: if imagination can be made visible in this way, then what exactly are we treating as evidence of it? Are we observing imagination itself, or only the forms it produces once it has been externalised? At this point, it is worth noting that this tension is not new. For philosopher Immanuel Kant, imagination was not simply creativity or fantasy, but a fundamental cognitive faculty: something that mediates between what we sense and what we understand, allowing the world to appear to us as coherent in the first place. In this sense, what Disney Imagineering makes visible might be understood not as imagination itself, but as the external trace of a much deeper and constant structuring process. What we encounter is the finished world, not the act of imagining that made it possible.

That question becomes even more complex when considered through lived experience. I trained and worked as an actor and so have spent a significant part of my life engaged in a very specific form of imagination, namely the sustained construction of other people. Whether inhabiting Lady Macbeth in ‘Macbeth’, or Nora in ‘A Doll’s House’, the work depends upon the ability to imagine an inner life that is not one’s own and to sustain that imagined world with emotional truth. In this context, imagination is not abstract; it is operational. It becomes a disciplined act of perspective-taking, embodiment and interpretation. This resonates closely with what Samuel Taylor Coleridge described as the ‘secondary imagination’: a creative faculty that does not simply reflect the world, but reshapes it, dissolving and re-forming experience into something new. This then raises a further question. If we attempted to measure imagination in such a context, what would we actually be measuring? Would it be the technical success of the performance, the emotional response of the audience, or the perceived believability of the character? Or would these, again, simply be outcomes: visible traces of an invisible process that is far more complex than any single indicator could capture? And if that is the case, then we again risk mistaking what imagination produces for imagination itself.

This tension becomes even more apparent when turning to literature, particularly Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’. The novel, one of my favourites, is narrated by protagonist Kathy H., who reflects on her childhood at Hailsham, a secluded boarding school that initially appears progressive and nurturing. Whilst there, students are encouraged to produce art and writing, which is carefully collected and discussed by their ‘guardians’. However, as the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that Hailsham exists within a wider system in which the students are clones, raised for organ donation. Within this setting, their creative work acquires a particular significance. It is not only appreciated for its aesthetic value but also examined as a possible indication of something deeper about them, namely whether they possess an inner life, an imagination, that can be recognised as fully human. At one point, this is expressed in the idea that their art is collected to determine whether or not they have souls. What Ishiguro does here is not simply construct a dystopia, but expose a more subtle epistemic habit: the tendency to treat creative expression as a proxy for something that cannot be directly seen. Imagination becomes legible only through its artefacts, and those artefacts are then used to infer what lies beneath. In doing so, imagination risks becoming indistinguishable from the evidence through which we attempt to know it. This connects closely with what Paul Ricoeur suggests about imagination and narrative: that we come to understand a person’s inner world through what they create, the stories they tell, and the forms they produce. Yet, as Ishiguro’s novel makes clear, there is something deeply unsettling in allowing those outputs to stand as proof of something as complex as a soul. Yet Ishiguro does not resolve this tension. He leaves it open, forcing the reader to sit with the discomfort of how quickly we turn expression into evidence, and evidence into judgement. This is not only a literary concern, but a broader epistemic one about how we come to understand and evidence human capacity.

Seen in this light, the same pattern resonates strongly with debates in education and assessment, particularly in the arts. Across subjects such as visual art, drama and creative writing, educators are routinely asked to make judgements about work that is expressive, interpretive and often unfinished in its meaning. Frameworks for assessing creativity have, of course, been developed, often focusing on originality, technical skill or communicative impact. Yet even here, the underlying tension remains. What is assessed is not imagination itself, but its manifestation in form: performance, artefact, composition. Each offers a visible trace of imaginative activity, but none can fully account for the interiority of the process that produced it. Creativity, like imagination, becomes something we infer through outcomes, raising questions about whether we are assessing the capacity itself or simply its most legible expressions.

And that is where the thread begins to come into focus. Across Disney Imagineering, my actorly practice, and Ishiguro’s Hailsham, a shared pattern emerges: imagination becomes visible only through what it produces, and those productions are then taken as evidence of imagination itself. So when I asked myself again, as I walked back to my hotel at the end of the first day of the conference, can we measure imagination? my instinct was almost scientific. Could we see it in an MRI scan? Could we trace it through neural activity, as different regions of the brain respond to possibility, projection and simulation? But a second question followed just as quickly: would we want to measure imagination, even if we could? Because in education, the decisions we make about what we choose to assess are as significant as the methods we use. Assessment does not simply record learning; it actively shapes what learning is understood to be.