Tom Bentley’s scientific contributions

Personalisation, argue the authors, promises to overcome the uneven results of educational delivery and link innovation in the public sector to the broader transformations in OECD societies. It is not purely a function of choice between alternative supply channels, but of shaping and combining different learning resources and sources of support around personal progression. Bentley and Miller discuss the personalisation divides – demand/supply, public/private. They describe entry points to system-wide change through different questions and issues: universal? diverse? transparent?; learning and teaching – the role of the active learner; learning beyond the classroom – the role of communities; reshaping roles and the workforce; organisation and coordination. The system-wide shift that personalisation could help to stimulate, they conclude, has the potential to be as profound as any transition that public education systems have undertaken before, but this requires both a compelling political narrative and a strategy for distributed change.

and policy discussions on education’s future and so is a natural component of CERI’s “Schooling for Tomorrow” programme. It springs from the awareness that “one-size-fits-all” approaches to school knowledge and organisation are illadapted both to individuals’ needs and to the knowledge society at large. But “personalisation” can mean many things and raises profound questions about the purposes and possibilities for education. The importance of airing these issues led to an international seminar – “Personalised Learning: the Future of Public Service Reform” – held in London in May 2004 bringing together the UK Department for Education and Skills (DfES), the think-tank Demos, and OECD/CERI. The key conference contributions have been elaborated into the chapters that make up this report.

Selon les auteurs, la personnalisation promet de pallier les résultats inégaux de l’offre éducative et de lier l’innovation dans le secteur public aux transformations plus larges qui s’opèrent dans les sociétés des pays de l’OCDE. Elle ne consiste pas simplement à choisir entre des circuits d’offre alternatifs mais à façonner et combiner différents moyens d’apprentissage et différentes sources de soutien autour d’une progression personnelle. Bentley et Miller discutent des lignes de fracture de la personnalisation : fracture entre l’offre et la demande, fracture entre public et privé. Ils décrivent les points d’accès au changement systémique au moyen d’une série de questions et de thèmes : universalité ? diversité ? transparence ? ; apprentissage et enseignement ; le rôle de l’apprenant actif ; l’apprentissage au-delà de la salle de classe : le rôle des communautés ; redéfinition des rôles du personnel éducatif ; organisation et coordination. Ils en concluent que la personnalisation pourrait contribuer à stimuler une évolution du système aussi profonde que n’importe quelle transition entreprise auparavant par les systèmes d’enseignement public, mais que cela suppose un discours politique convaincant et une stratégie de distribution du changement.

Commissioned by the National College for School Leadership this report co-authored by Riel Miller, while he was at the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation and Tom Bentley, then Director at Demos in London, explores the leadership opportunities that emerge when the future is used in different ways. In this case the future is used to question underlying anticipatory assumptions - imagining a society where 'unique creation' dominates and the role of learning has been transformed.