Michele Ledda
posted 25 June 2007

'Personalised learning' is the central concept behind the current reforms of the education system in Britain. It sounds harmless enough, even sensible. But personalised learning is not simply about teaching children as individuals. In fact, 'personalisation' is much wider trend affecting all public services and transforming the relationship between citizen and state. It amounts to a new social contract, through which, rather than relating to citizens politically as autonomous individuals, the state seeks to 'get into the bloodstream of society' and shape our behaviour at a personal, psychological level.

The importance of education to this enterprise is obvious, but its role in the personalisation agenda comes at the expense of its essence as the means by which society passes on knowledge in particular subjects, and equips children with the intellectual resources they need to think independently.

If the era of comprehensive education was characterised by the belief that the state should provide all children with the opportunity to have the same good education, policy-makers and educationalists now insist that the education system should recognise the particular needs of each child and personalise both the curriculum and the teaching methods. Any teacher wanting to progress in her career, any school wanting to receive a good Ofsted report, must show that they are personalising learning in various ways.

Personalising learning means involving pupils and parents in the learning process and the running of schools through a series of disparate measures, such as: consulting them regularly, especially through surveys; setting personal targets for each pupil, preferably in consultation with the pupil; discovering each pupil’s learning style and differentiating lessons to appeal to different kinds of learners; asking pupils to mark each other’s work; asking pupils to reflect on their own learning so that they can ‘learn how to learn’ and become ‘independent learners’; trying to foster a passion and a habit for lifelong learning; involving parents in various school matters from discipline to homework, from supervising their children’s diet on behalf of the school to helping them achieve their personal targets.

This also means that teachers must radically alter their role, from teaching pupils their subject, to becoming partners in learning together with parents and pupils. Instead of educating the child to a common standard, teachers must now help the child to discover and fulfil his potential.

The green paper Every Child Matters (ECM, 2003) sets five objectives for all children: be healthy, stay safe, enjoy and achieve, make a positive contribution and achieve economic well-being. Since they have been applied to education, they represent the first major formalisation by the state of the principle of personalised learning, whereby the general well-being of the child, and not his intellectual emancipation through learning, becomes the primary purpose of education.

In embracing ECM, schools at best dilute and at worst abandon what is unique about education, namely, teaching all children to read, write and count, and passing on the knowledge that has been developed in the various disciplines over the course of millennia.

Personalised learning is not a pedagogic theory or a coherent set of teaching methods. Although it often does draw on what were once radical pedagogic theories, it is not primarily concerned with teaching or knowledge. Rather, it is a general principle that has been relentlessly imposed through what Prime Minister Tony Blair calls the government’s ‘mission to personalise and empower’ (Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, 2007: 4). While there has been little resistance from the teaching profession, personalised learning is part of a wider shift in the provision of public services, away from universal provision and towards personalisation.

In his speech announcing his candidature as the new leader of the Labour Party and the new prime minister, Gordon Brown stated that his government’s main objective will be the personalisation of public services, with education and health his top priorities. He made clear that personalisation is not just about the provision of services, but it is a new way of governing by involving citizens in decision making: ‘you cannot meet [today’s] challenges the old way. You cannot meet these challenges by simply legislating. You can only meet these challenges by people themselves being involved in the solution to the problems.’

Personalisation is not just about receiving a good service from the state – a good education or prompt treatment from the NHS – nor just about being involved in decision making – e.g. parents and pupils having a say in how schools are run – but about citizens taking personal responsibility for solving social or even global problems by making changes to their everyday behaviour. Brown explained what he meant by people being involved in the solution to the problems: ‘you can only meet the environmental challenge by people taking personal and social responsibility as well as government investing and cooperating in Europe.’

In education, personalisation means shifting part of the responsibility for children’s education from the school onto parents and children. It means asking children to participate in and take personal responsibility for shaping their own education. This represents a huge change which completely alters the fundamental relationship between teacher and pupil, and the very meaning of education. Teachers are not subject experts any more but become ‘partners in learning’. The personalisation agenda aims to formalise and give far greater impetus to a change that has already happened in schools across the country. As far as health is concerned, personalisation means asking citizens to take personal responsibility for their own health by adopting a healthy and safe lifestyle. Above all, personalisation means creating a new social contract, finding a new role for government and for citizens in a society without politics.

The essence of personalised learning is the attempt to build a new kind of relationship between the state and the individual, a more personal relationship in which the state promises ‘empowerment’ and well-being in exchange for letting the state shape the individual’s behaviour and consumer choices. From the point of view of the individual, learning becomes an activity like dieting or exercising, through which the individual pursues a never-ending, lifelong quest for well-being. From the point of view of the state, regulating people’s private lives gives a new role to institutions that have been left disoriented by the retreat of the public sphere. Put another way, it is an attempt to run society by influencing collective behaviour, not through collective and open political persuasion, but through micro-managing the personal life of each individual.

This model assumes a new kind of semi-autonomous citizen who must be monitored and educated, empowered by the state, before he is able to make the right choices, a citizen who is not completely aware of his own interest. It is telling that the advocates of the personalisation of public services often do not distinguish between children and adults when they discuss the relationship between the state and its citizens. All are thought to be selfish consumers, engaged in maximising short-term outcome and in need of education to make them aware of the public good and their own long-term interest.

The ideal system, in the eyes of policy-makers, seems to be one in which the bureaucratic state of old which ‘commands and controls’ disappears, to be substituted by a more subtle system of controls in which every citizen is required to become a bureaucrat and in which different parts of society control one another on behalf of the state. In this sense, though politicians often talk about cutting red tape, they are actually presiding over the bureaucratisation of society.

The personal in ‘personalised public services’ has more than one meaning. The first meaning is supposed to appeal to the consumer side of the citizen with the promise of greater efficiency and flexibility in the provision of public services. The second meaning, which is the one that appeals to the state, refers to the citizen taking personal responsibility for the public good. With rights – to better public services – come responsibilities – to be aware of the public good (responsibility to others) and your own long term interest (responsibility towards the self) and modify your behaviour accordingly. A third meaning of personal is that the state becomes involved in the private life of the individual, helping to ‘shape the self’ (Bentley 2004; Leadbeater 2004).

Participation in this behaviour modification programme is not optional. In order to use the personalised public services, citizens will have to co-operate with doctors, teachers and other state agents in setting their own targets, which will define the extent to which they are successful or failed citizens (learners, more appropriately). It is worth noting that failed citizens will take the blame for what would otherwise be understood as failed policies. This is a process of regulation that allows the authorities to shift accountability onto individuals and service providers.

Personalised learning cannot be understood in terms of educational theory alone, then, outside the wider framework of the personalisation of public services. I will therefore examine the concept of personalisation of public services as a whole and its application in education. Further research is needed for a more thorough understanding of the concept of personalisation, for a critique of specific aspects of personalised learning, and to explore the relationship between child-centred pedagogic theories developed by radical educationalists in the past and their present use by the government, including the cultural context that has made possible this strange meeting of ideas.

The Personalisation of Public Services

Government cannot decide on its definition of the public good and impose it from above, at least not continually. It cannot simply regulate smoking, poor reading and bad eating habits out of existence.

Government has to become molecular: it has to get into the bloodstream of society, not impose change or deliver solutions from without. Government is exercised in a myriad of micro settings, and often not just by state employees but by teachers, experts, advisers, parents, volunteers and peers.

(Charles Leadbeater, Personalisation Through Participation: A new script for public services, Demos, 2004:89)

The policy review paper Building on Progress: Public Services, by the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, published in March 2007, explains what the government means by personalisation:

Personalisation is the process by which services are tailored to the needs and preferences of citizens. The overall vision is that the state should empower citizens to shape their own lives and the services they receive. (p33, my italics)

Thus politicians present personalisation as a transfer of power from the centralised state to the people, a kind of devolution of power, when in fact citizen participation means following scripts provided by the state, as Charles Leadbeater suggests in the quotation above. This ambiguity in the concept of personalisation, which can disguise a process of regulation as if it were its exact opposite, is expressed in the distinction between ‘shallow’ and ‘deep’ personalisation. The shallow version simply refers to more efficient and more flexible public services that better suit the needs of individual users. Deep personalisation establishes a closer, more personal relationship between the state and its citizens.

The discussion of shallow and deep personalisation also reveals how citizens are viewed by policy-makers. People are generally seen as shallow or selfish consumers, unaware of the big issues facing the world and of their own long-term interest. Even when people are aware of the impact of their behaviour on their own health and on the environment, they seem unable to take concrete action and change their behaviour. The proponents of personalisation would like us to become deeper, more responsible citizens, more aware of how our behaviour can influence society and the environment. The promise of shallow personalisation (better public services) is supposed to appeal to the greedy consumers and convince them to participate, but the real aim is to transform them, through participation, into more active, more responsible citizens.

Leadbeater envisages five stages leading from shallow to deep personalisation, during which users’ ‘participation, commitment, knowledge and responsibility increases.’ At the end of this process the state, using as its agents the professionals delivering public services, such as doctors and teachers, would transform passive consumers into active citizens: ‘In the fifth [stage], the professionals are designing environments, networks and platforms through which people can together devise their own solutions.’

In case there were any doubts as to what Leadbeater means by people devising their own solutions, he clarifies with an example:

Further reductions in premature deaths from heart disease will come from more personalised public services. But far more gains will come from persuading people to take more exercise, eat healthier diets, stop smoking and not drink too much alcohol. Future big, cost-effective reductions in heart disease will turn on self-organising solutions: the fifth and most radical form of personalisation set out above. (2004:26)

To me this sounds a lot more like a process of regulation of people’s behaviour than devolution of power from the state to its citizens, as it is often presented by politicians when they state that the personalisation of public services is the most important priority facing future governments.

Letting the state shape our selves

Just like the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit, Leadbeater argues for the more extreme version of personalisation, his fifth option, which is more about public services shaping the individual than the individual shaping public services:

Personalisation could mean self-organisation: the public good emerging from within society, in part, through the way that public policy shapes millions of individual decisions about how we exercise, eat, smoke, drink, save for our pensions, read to our children, pay our taxes and so on. Many of our biggest social challenges [...] will only be met if we promote a mass social innovation within society: self-organising solutions. (2004:23-4, my emphases)

‘Self-organising’ here has a double meaning, which helps clarify the essence of personalisation and its appeal to politicians. One is the promise of individual autonomy, as it envisages public services that empower citizens to devise personal solutions to their problems (‘shallow personalisation’ which treats the citizen as a consumer) the other is the more important sense in which the state helps organise the self, so that ‘public policy [can shape] millions of individual decisions.’ In this sense personalisation is not really about treating people as consumers but as children (learners, more appropriately) who need to be educated before they can be in a position to pursue their own interests.

Consumers who freely pursue their own interests are seen as disruptive, creating social and environmental problems. There is also a clear recognition that people’s disengagement from politics has created a huge problem of legitimacy for government and other state institutions: ‘Liberal democracy combined with market capitalism has reinforced the tendency of individuals to act in ways that reduce our ability to make collective choices. This is the underlying reason for the crisis in democracy.’ (Bentley, 2005:10)

While New Labour accepts consumerism as inevitable and welcomes it to an extent, many would like to exploit its positive side, the promise of freedom and self-betterment it offers the individual, to transfer that individual motivation onto a more socially responsible and civically engaged form of consumerism. As Tom Bentley puts it, 'The mistake lies in refusing to recognise that consumerism does harness people's underlying desire to shape their own lives for the better, not just in having endlessly more to consume, but in taking active authorship of their own identities’ (2004). Hence the two aspects of personalisation embodied in the deep version: it retains the shallow version’s promise of more efficient public services, the ‘rights’ side of the equation; but it also adds the idea of citizen participation (the responsibilities side), in which the citizen takes responsibility for some of the functions previously exercised by the state, and participates in shaping public services, while at the same time letting the state ‘participate’ in his private life and shape his personal behaviour.

Tom Bentley, former director of Demos, describes personalisation as an attempt to create a synthesis between the consumer and the citizen. He envisages a new politics that, through engagement with the self, can recreate a narrative of progress and project it onto the personal choices of the consumer:

The challenge, then, is for politics to offer citizens ways in which their own personal choices can deepen the forms of achievement and satisfaction they are able to achieve, and in the process contribute to the vitality, fairness or sustainability of the wider context we all inhabit. In other words, politics must enable people to become better citizens while becoming more active shapers of their own personal stories. (Bentley: 2004, my emphasis)

In this vision, consumer freedom and social responsibility coincide, if the state can participate in the creation of the citizen’s self:

‘There is a potential synthesis here, offering the possibility of constructing political programmes which carry far greater resonance with most people's experience of everyday life, while enabling forms of participation and collective choice which themselves strengthen the effectiveness and responsiveness of governance. The route to this synthesis lies in re-appraising the basis of the self, and the practical meaning of 'choice' in the many different settings where the modern individual now has to exercise it.’ (my emphasis)

The synthesis between consumer and citizen corresponds to the balancing of (consumer) rights and responsibilities. As James Panton, politics lecturer at St John’s College, Oxford, notes in the Manifesto Club conference paper The Role of the State, this concept of rights (the model of the EU convention on human rights) is very different from the idea of rights as inalienable attributes of the citizen which are held before the state (the model of the US constitution).

This model of rights is a concession given by the state only to responsible citizens. The Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit makes this very clear:

Balancing rights and responsibilities: empowered citizens expect and have a right to public services that are responsive to their needs and preferences. But many of the outcomes sought from public services require changes in individual behaviour: better health requires healthier lifestyles; improved education and attainment requires greater parental engagement. (Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, 2007:31)

Panton explains what kind of citizen is assumed by the empowering state:
‘The paradox is that the explicit aim of empowering us to take more responsibility for our lives is underpinned by a view of individual who, in the absence of third party intervention, cannot possibly navigate their way through life. It is a vision which begins from the premise of individuals as vulnerable and incapable, and moves through an attempt to educate, cajole, and construct us as good citizens.’

Participation in this behaviour modification programme is not optional. The good citizen is redefined as someone who seeks help from the state and cooperates with state guidelines, issued through state agents such as teachers, doctors, health visitors, and an army of other advisers. Citizens do not have the option not to exercise their ‘rights’:

Public services that have been reformed along the personalised lines suggested in this document place extra responsibility on citizens. If the Government gives people the power to choose, or express a view, they need to take up that power. Also, it is incumbent on citizens to make responsible use of services. In other words, with rights come responsibilities. (Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, 2007:74, my emphasis)

Personalised Learning

One way of describing the new citizen assumed by the personalised public services is to see him as a ‘lifelong learner’. It is telling that in their discussion of personalised services, policy makers do not distinguish between children and adults. All have to be drawn into a closer relationship with the state which is effectively a relationship of dependence, even if it is described as a partnership, since the state participates in shaping people’s personal choices, their behaviour and even their aspirations.

Frank Furedi points out that ‘behaviour modification has become a substitute for promoting socialization through attempting to win the arguments through reasoned debate.’ (Furedi: 2005) In other words, ‘education’ has replaced open political debate as a means to influence people’s minds. In the process, people are seen as less rational. Since it is behaviour, not human action and thinking, that is being targeted, education here does not mean intellectual development but behaviour modification.

Education is central to policy-makers’ attempt to influence people’s behaviour in two crucial ways. First of all the education system is the only state institution that can closely monitor every individual for at least 11 years of his life and at a time when he is most impressionable.

Secondly, the teaching and behaviour modification techniques developed in education (and in psychotherapy) are being applied to the adult population which is considered in need of lifelong learning in various areas of their private lives, from parenting to how to conduct intimate relationships. Indeed, media commentators and policy-makers nowadays seem unable to discuss any social problem without proposing more education as a solution.

Leadbeater states that ‘one of the largest applications [of personalisation] should be in education.’ (p68) In his view, personalisation should extend the methods used with children with special needs to all children, since it should recognise the special needs of every individual child: ‘The school system already recognises that some children have ‘special’ needs ... Personalised learning would extend this principle, already implicit in the system, to all children.’ (p69) He criticises the old comprehensive ideal: ‘Equity cannot be handed down from on high in a society with a democratic culture in which people want a say in shaping their lives. Comprehensives promoted equity through common standards.’

Leadbeater also shows that the idea of engaging the learner is exactly the same as the methods used in every ‘personalised public service’ in order to transform the consumer into an active citizen: ‘[Pupils’] personal involvement in making choices about what they learn, how and what targets they set for themselves, would turn them into more active learners.’ (my emphasis)

He stresses that personalisation is not the same as consumerism: ‘Personalised learning does not apply market thinking to education. It is not designed to turn children and parents into consumers of education.’ Its aim is instead ‘to promote personal development through self-realisation, self-enhancement and self-development. The child/learner should be seen as active, responsible and self-motivated, a co-author of the script which determines how education is delivered.’ (p70)

There is no distinction between the active child/learner and the active citizen. Besides, as the title of Tom Bentley’s article, ‘The Self-Creating Society’ suggests, the idea of active citizen is very ambiguous, it promises empowerment (the individual participates in creating society) but at the price of letting the state help shape the self. That the active citizen and the active learner coincide is made very clear in most education policy documents. For example, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority’s latest consultation paper reminds readers, in every particular subject, that the purpose of teaching that subject is to ‘contribute to achievement of the curriculum aims for all young people to become:

• successful learners who enjoy learning, make progress and achieve
• confident individuals who are able to live safe, healthy and fulfilling lives
• responsible citizens who make a positive contribution to society.

Here the purpose of education is redefined as creating the semi-autonomous active citizen: a lifelong learner who is health and safety conscious and shows a degree of social responsibility. Whereas the purpose of a liberal education was to produce educated citizens, the personalised education system aims to produce ‘successful learners’.

In a similar vein, the recently published DfES report on personalised learning, 2020 Vision, written by a group of leading educationalists chaired by Christine Gilbert, Chief Inspector of Ofsted, states that ‘during their school years, children should grow from relative dependence on their parents and teachers into mature learners.’ (2006:5)

In conclusion, personalised learning has little to do with education in the sense of passing on knowledge to the next generation. It is driven by an attempt to change the very nature of citizenship and democracy and, despite using the language of autonomy and freedom, it ends up reducing the autonomy of the individual and allowing the state to intervene in his private life.

The most that can be said in favour or the personalisation agenda is that it is an attempt to deal with a genuine problem, that it is motivated by a concern about the growing lack of legitimacy of public institutions and an attempt to recreate a meaningful public life of sorts.

Its negative, destructive side comes from the lack of belief on the part of politicians in their own ability to inspire the electorate with a political programme – because they tend to see citizens as selfish consumers who don’t understand their own long term interest and genuinely need help in order to live fulfilling and responsible lives. In education this is reflected in an inability to believe that it is possible to educate the majority of children by teaching them a common body of knowledge – a lack of belief in the ability of the average child to learn difficult subjects. In some policy proposals you can almost sense a fear of engaging with either adults or children, which seems to defeat the purpose of a search for legitimacy.

An argument in defence of meaningful education based on the acquisition of knowledge should start from a critique of the relationship between the state and its citizens (and ultimately the idea of human being) that the advocates of personalisation are trying to promote. Showing that personalisation is an attempt – by a state that is fearful of engaging with its citizens – to influence people’s behaviour through education techniques and to restrict our freedom rather than to devise more efficient public services, including better standards in education, could be a starting point to open up the debate.

Michele Ledda is an English teacher and co-ordinator of the Manifesto Club's education hub. He recently contributed to The Corruption of the Curriculum, published by Civitas.

References

Bentley, T, Everyday Democracy: We Get The Politicians We Deserve, London: Demos, 2005
Bentley, T, ‘The Self-creating Society’, in Renewal: A Journal of Labour Politics, Vol.12, No 1, 2004
Bentley, T, and James Wilsdon eds. The Adaptive State: Strategies for personalising the public realm, London: Demos, 2003
Furedi, F, Politics of Fear, London: Continuum, 2005
Gilbert, C, et al 2020 Vision: Report of the Teaching and Learning in 2020 Review Group, DfES, 2006
Leadbeater, C, Personalisation Through Participation: A new script for public services, London: Demos, 2004
Panton, J The Role of the State, Manifesto Club, 2006
Prime Minister Strategy Unit, Building on Progress: Public Services, 2007