Personalised Learning: Ambiguities in Theory and Practice

Abstract

This paper traces the origins of the concept of personalisation in public sector services, and applies it to school education. The original conceptualisation stressed the need for 'deep' rather than shallow, personalisation, if radical transformation of services were to be achieved. It is argued that as the concept has been disseminated and implemented through policy documents, notably the 2005 White Paper, it has lost its original emphasis on deep personalisation. The focus in this article is particularly upon gifted and talented students whose education provides the best case example of how the theory of personalisation might work in practice. Two examples of the lessons in a sixth form college are used to illustrate the character of personalised pedagogy in practice. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.Personalisation is a contestable concept applied to the planning and delivery of public sector services in England. It was introduced into the policy arena following the publication of a paper from a think tank, Demos, by Leadbeater (2003). The concept was at first misunderstood as the individualisation of services, but personalisation is a far more socially-oriented idea. Leadbeater argued that personalisation could operate at five increasingly deeply structured levels. These were:• providing more customer friendly services; • giving people more say in navigating their way through services; • giving users more say over how money is spent; • users becoming co-designers and co-producers of services; • self-organisation by individuals working with the support and advisory systems provided by professionals.

School curriculum, globalisation and the constitution of policy problems and solutions

“…But the capacity for independent learning, as promoted by skills-based curricula, is not equally distributed amongst social classes and cultures in English schools, and may continue and/or increase inequalities between youngsters (Campbell et al 2007;Hartley 2009). The curriculum model embedded in the PLTS framework, identified through the objectives and the three 'curriculum questions': 'What are we trying to achieve?…”

“…This way, personalisation appears to 308 C. Winter offer hope to schools through a promised re-culturing that provides answers to all problems of under-achieving, poorly motivated and unsuccessful learners, whilst instituting, by a sleight of semantics, no more or less than a market economy and consumer society. Hartley (2007), Campbell et al (2007 and Beach and Dovemark (2009) have exposed the link between education, curriculum and the economy perpetrated through agendas of personalisation and choice. Their assessment is that under pressures to reduce spending in public services, personalisation forms a convenient mechanism for transferring responsibility for service provision from the state to the individual.…”

Bridging the teacher/researcher divide: Master’s-level work in initial teacher education

“…As a recent government initiative, PL featured minimally in the academic press, with articles focusing largely on the challenges of defining and implementing it and its ideological foundation linked closely with the highly regulated curriculum (Burton 2007;Courcier 2007;Campbell et al 2007;Underwood and Banyard 2008). Government documentation defined it as 'taking a highly structured and responsive approach to each child's and young person's learning, in order that all are able to progress, achieve and participate' (DfES 2006, 6).…”

Families, Education and Giftedness

“…Co-construction of knowledge was a central characteristic of 'personalised' education, promoted at the time of our research by the English government as an important pedagogical innovation (see Campbell et al 2007b, where personalised education is seen as particularly appropriate for gifted students). Our families, parents and children, used this metaphor to indicate their construction of giftedness as the unusually strong acquisition and retention of factual and conceptual knowledge; absorbing knowledge and memorising it in order to reproduce it in tests, examinations and assessments.…”