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Commentary - October 2006

What’s new about personalisation?

‘Personalisation’ is an idea currently working its way through the public realm – in health, social care and education. But how does it differ from what we already know and do, asks ANNIE MERTON

Inspired by the final year of my sociology degree course in which we explored whether education can or cannot compensate for society, I decided to become a teacher. The following year I enrolled on a radical new primary education PGCE at Goldsmiths College, borne out of the Plowden report and set up to champion child-centred education. It provided as good a grounding as you could want in the values and methods of learner-centred education, set in the context of five to 11 year olds and the communities they lived in. Later I discovered these approaches to be equally valid when teaching adults. The course may have been a bit thin at times on how to teach basic reading if instilling a love of books hadn’t quite done the trick or how to manage a classroom of unruly ten year olds in Spitalfields, but these you could learn later.

As, indeed, I did. I learned how to balance individual needs with those of the group and how to plan my teaching for the whole class so that some children could take what we were doing further and others, who needed more help with the basics, could have that too. I wanted the children to have a say in how the classroom was organised and be reasonably independent within it. But what was also really important to me was that the children would learn how to balance their own individual wants and needs with those of others, and that sometimes, in subordinating their own to those of the wider group, they might even find something better happened than they could have made happen on their own.

Later on, when I did discover the excitement of adult learning and left school-teaching to work in the community, teaching adult literacy and ESOL, the values of learner centred education came again to the fore. In our ESOL classes in the Inner London Education Authority we worked out the syllabus by building it up from what we discovered about the learners’ individual life situations and need to speak English. We identified the common themes and topics that would meet the needs of most and made these our starting point. In adult literacy we taught people what they said they wanted to learn in the ways they told us worked for them. Along the way we encouraged them to talk more about how they learned and to exchange their work with others. We believed that having difficulties with literacy should not be something private and individual, and that confidence would come through a shared engagement in a learning process with the tools of reading and writing at its core. The learner centred ethos of my earlier training at Goldsmiths continued to serve my teaching well.

I have been reminded of these experiences recently while reading what is being said and written now about personalisation in teaching and learning. ‘Personalisation’ is an idea being currently worked through the public realm – in health, social care and schools. At its heart it is about ensuring that public services are offered in ways that are responsive to individuals and have been tailored to their specific needs and interests. In adult learning, personalisation could, therefore, mean anything from ensuring individual needs are catered for within a group setting to offering a service where individuals learn what they like, how they like and when they like, unconstrained by the conventions which shape the way we currently design, organise and run our learning institutions (e-learning and the new technologies seem to have much to offer here). It seems very close to the approaches adopted in the now much repudiated ‘progressive’ classrooms of the 1970s where we endeavoured to encourage a love of learning.

We need some clear thinking on what is meant by personalisation; and whether and how it differs from what we already know and do. For example, how does personalised learning differ from individualised learning? To what extent and in what facets is it different from the inclusive learning advanced by John Tomlinson (Inclusive Learning, HMSO 1996)? How do we square the notion of individual choice implied by personalisation with a curriculum offer that is driven more and more by state priorities? And, call me old fashioned, but wasn’t there – isn’t there – something exciting about people coming together to learn something as a group, which changes the way they see things and makes some difference to them all? As our society becomes more fragmented, we need more of this and not less. And we need to train our teachers to see and understand the potential of education not only in helping learners achieve their individual goals but also in shaping society in much the way we debated it, in that sociology degree some 35 years ago.

Annie Merton is Senior Development Officer, Community Learning, NIACE

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