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Most of us would like to think we've come a long way from the kinds of educational practices satirised by Dickens 150 years ago, which leave no scope at all for children's creativity, imagination or interests.

Yet the journey from an education system that views children as empty vessels waiting to be filled with facts to one that acknowledges children's individuality has been a bumpy one: progressive educational trends have often been followed by a resounding backlash. Today, however, the thinking of Government and leading educationalists is dominated by what may turn out to be a truly radical idea: personalised learning.

Ask six people what personalised learning means and you'll get six different answers. Despite its name, it is not about making greater use of individual learning - personalised learning often takes place in groups. Neither is it exclusively about adapting teaching methods to the learning styles of different pupils, though it can have an element of that. The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) describes it as "the drive to tailor education to individual need, interest and aptitude so as to fulfil every young person's potential." In other words, it is about making education more learner-centred.

From the Government's point of view, personalised education is part of a wider strategy to give people a greater say in public services, responding to what they want and need rather than what institutions think they should have. In education, that means acknowledging that everyone is different: that pupils and students have different aptitudes, interests and ambitions. As Matthew Horne, of the DfES's Strategy Unit, puts it: "Children have a variety of different starting points, and the one-size-fits-all approach to teaching doesn't work."

According to Horne, the idea of personalised education owes much to academic research on metacognition, also known as 'learning how to learn'. What teachers need to be able to do is help children understand how they learn so that they can have greater control over their own learning. "There is very good empirical evidence," says Horne, "that if you improve the learning skills of individual children then they progress more effectively and successfully and their attainment will improve."

But why has the idea of personalised learning come to the forefront now? Professor Andrew Pollard, Director of the ESRC-funded Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP), suggests that it can be seen as a continuation of a process by which central Government has taken greater control over what happens in the classroom: "Having introduced a National Curriculum inspection, assessment and teaching strategies over some years, standards have now stalled a bit, and so a new strategy had to be thought about." Pollard welcomes the direction the Government is now taking: "You've got to motivate children, and if you want them to learn you've got to engage with their minds. In principle then, the direction is absolutely right."

The DfES lists five areas where a student-centred approach can be taken: assessment, teaching and learning, curriculum choice, school organisation and out-of-school partnerships. Instead of summative assessment, which simply records how well or badly a student has done, assessment becomes formative, enabling students and their teachers to identify areas of strength and weakness in order to improve their learning.

ICT has a central role to play in delivering a more personalised approach. It enables greater collaboration both in the classroom and outside it: for example, through the internet or video-conferencing, the student who has a specialised interest can more easily make contact with experts or other students with a similar interest. Children can, if they prefer, work in groups or in pairs, or use discussion boards to comment on each others' work. If they want to continue internet-based research at home, they can. At the same time, technology offers greater opportunities for formative assessment, making it easier, for example, for students to carry a personalised record of their achievement in the form of an e-portfolio.

One of the concerns Pollard has is that the DfES strategy may, despite the stated intentions, remain too focused on teaching and not enough on learning: "It seems to have more to do with how you organise the classroom, how you present a curriculum, how you assess and how you relate to the children. Whilst it's obviously appropriate for teachers to consider such things, that's not quite the same as encouraging them to focus on how children construct knowledge in their minds."

Pollard's observations point to a potential paradox at the heart of personalisation, which is whether you can centrally impose a more devolved and democratic approach to learning. It is at least arguable that a learner-centred approach is at odds with the requirements of National Curriculum Standard Attainment Tests (SATs).

Horne's response to this is that the National Curriculum represents a core body of knowledge to which all children are 'entitled', and that SATs remain an important form of public accountability rather than qualifications that children achieve. Pollard thinks otherwise: "A National Curriculum is certainly a form of entitlement, but there also need to be sufficient opportunities for teachers to be responsive to specific learner needs. There is plenty of research which shows how SATs constrain such responsiveness and distort the curriculum. To promote personalisation and to persist with SATs is deeply contradictory." There are bound to be tensions, he says, in trying to square that particular circle.

The Government would argue that personalisation is less about a top-down imposition, and more about learning from the good work that many teachers already do. Its aim, it says, is to make "the best practices universal". Yet Roland Meighan, Director of the small publisher Educational Heretics Press, author of a recent radical book 'Comparing Learning Systems' and founder of the Personalised Education Now trust, argues that the Government's approach to personalisation is deeply conservative and based on an outdated view of how children learn. Meighan believes that schools are "learner-hostile" institutions that artificially group children into fixed age groups and force them into taking part in a curriculum they are not necessarily interested in.

Before attending school, he argues, children are naturally curious and questioning, but after a year at school, that questioning drops dramatically: "In that first year children understand that their interests and concerns are being hijacked and forced into a mould of the teacher-directed curriculum." He maintains that "the 'day prison' approach to learning of mass coercive schooling is, in a democracy, (a) obsolete in an information-rich society, (b) counter-productive by producing the dumbed-down kind of person, and (c) an abuse of human rights." Meighan believes that a truly learner-centred approach would give children the freedom to follow their own interests, guided by what he calls "learner travel agents".

It is unlikely that the Government will adopt such a radical approach, though the experience of William Booth School in Nottingham suggests that, even within the confines of an ordinary state school, a strong degree of personalisation is possible. Ultimately, however, the success or failure of the personalisation initiative will hinge on the goodwill of teachers. As Pollard says, "Implementation comes down to individual teachers working with learners. When it gets to the classroom you rely on the skill and judgement of the teacher."

References

DfES (2004). A National Conversation about Personalised Learning: www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/innovation-unit/personalisation

TLRP (2005). Personalised Learning: www.tlrp.org/documents/personalised_learning.pdf

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