Personalisation came to the forefront of the English reform agenda as the ‘big idea’ (Milliband) in2004. In this country, it has been specifically devised as a means to restructure public services like health and education. Even before that date but more intensively after the English agenda, reform initiatives and some piece-meal strategies are to be found, for instance, in such diverse contexts as Italy, Sweden or Japan.

Two main perspectives are simultaneously at work in recent scholarship. In the first, personalisation is assessed as global education policy, in line with the current restructuring reforms of State administration worldwide. From this perspective, personalisation is largely a matter of education policy, clearly lacking proper pedagogical theory (Hartley, 2007; Peters, 2009). In the second perspective, personalisation is assumed to be not only a matter of recent education politics concerned with school customers and their choices, but foremost a reassembly of old and new pedagogical approaches under a new reform.

This round table is based on several contributions which mainly engage with contextual reasons and rationalities that lead to a myriad of initiatives which may be fully or partly subsumed by an umbrella “personalisation” idea. Personalised learning as global education policy concept is the main focus of our analysis. For Beach and Dovemark (2009), the personalisation of learning and curricula (or individualisering as it is called in Swedish)  is a new global education policy to support the promotion of freedom of choice, private/individual responsibility and personal dimensions of knowledge rather than the acquisition of particular formal knowledge packages. Peters (2009) argue for the notion of ‘personalisation’ as a consequence of open communication and knowledge systems, as a principle of autonomy and related toUnited Kingdom. Courcier and Nasu (2012) discuss “individualised instruction and personalised learning” as a curriculum reform principle over the ‘70s, in relation to Japanese cultural and pedagogical practices.

The very action of documenting a plurality of policy perspectives in cultural and political contexts cannot logically lead to finding or proposing a stable definition. A sociological and comparative endeavour focused on its ingredients and meanings cannot engage at the same time with a normative pedagogical approach and thus cannot offer “the answer” to the  question: “what does personalisation mean?". Much more relevant are its conceptual plasticity and political flexibility, which is the focus of this round table. Hence, we are foremost concerned with processes of recontextualisation from the perspective of national policy making as a process of bricolage (Ball, 1998). Nevertheless, it is however possible to capture local theories, different rationales and perspectives at work while interacting with more historical or recent ‘ingredients’ of personalisation.

The main research questions are:

– Which are the policy strategies and the everyday education practices, in different contexts?

–  Which ingredients and theories of personalisation as legitimated knowledge at a global level are locally adopted and adapted in different countries?

–  Which alliances between the public and the private are proposed?

Ball, S. (1997). Policy sociology and critical social research: a personal review of recent education policy and policy research. British Educational Research Journal, 23(3), 257–274. Ball, S. (1998). Big policies/small world: an introduction to international perspectives in education policy. Comparative Education, 34(2), 119–130 Courcier, I. & Nasu, M. (2012) Personalised Learning in Japan. In M. Mincu (Ed). Personalisation of education in contexts: Policy critique and theories of personal improvement. Rotterdam/Boston/Tai Pei: Sense Publishers. Hartley, D. (2007). Personalisation: the emerging ‘revised’ code of education? Oxford Review of Education, 33(5), 629–642. Paulston, R. (2003). A spatial turn in comparative education? Constructing a social cartography of difference. In Schriewer, J. (Ed.). Discourse formation in comparative education. Frankfurrt: Peter Lang. Peters, M. A. (2009). Personalisation, personalised learning and the reform of social policy: the prospect of molecular governance in the digitised society. Policy Futures in Education, 7(6), 615–627.