Fielding, Michael; (2008) Personalisation, education and the market. Soundings , 2008 (38) pp. 56-69.

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Abstract

Much of the evidence on the current state of public education in England suggests, if not a deep unease, then a substantial ambivalence about some of the consequences of neoliberal reform polices. Newspaper headlines like ‘Backlash against testing regime’ (Times Educational Supplement 12 October, 2007 p.14) are increasingly common, and statements from school students themselves that talk of ‘overstressed young people desperately slaving away for the grade their school needs to stay at the top of the tables’ (The Guardian 16th October, 2007 p.6) corroborate the findings of the 2007 UNICEF Study of child well-being in rich countries. Along with the increasing immiseration of contemporary ‘high performance’ schooling through narrow curricula, results-driven pedagogy and the myopic tyranny of externally imposed targets, affecting teachers and families as much as it does students, we have the persistent corrosion of the public realm through the inveterate mendacity of the market and its capacity to, as Stuart Hall suggested at a recent Soundings ‘Cultures of Capitalism’ seminar, ‘change the purpose of organisations without changing their form’. The increasingly tight link between renewal of school buildings through the multi-million pound Building Schools for the Future initiative and the expansion of the Academies programme is emblematic not only of New Labour’s capitulation to the blandishments of the market, but also to its abandonment of democratic forms of life predicated on values and traditions that question both the preeminent desirability of self-interested consumption and the wider efficacy of invisible hands grasping the meaning or significance of an inclusive common good. Sensitivities to some of these concerns about reductionist approaches and centralist tendencies, in part necessary to create appropriate conditions for marketisation of state education, have contributed, not only to the government’s December 2007 announcement about change in testing regimes, but also to the underlying emphasis on ‘personalisation’ and its emergence as an increasingly dominant mantra in the ‘modernisation’, not only of education, but of other public services

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