Our understanding of learning is changing. Throughout the history of compulsory education society has aimed to create systems that would enable all children and young people to be successful, achieve their potential and become active citizens, within safe and secure environments.

In the past this was largely undertaken with little recognition of individuality, personal needs or aspirations. The system of the 20th Century derived from a need to educate everyone, and in order to deliver scale was largely predicated on a 'one size fits all' old model, comparable with the factory models of Ford and Taylor.

Since the start of the 21st Century there has been a drive to create social systems with the citizen at their centre, developing systems that are more responsive to individual needs. In the UK education sector, this is referred to as personalised learning, following the emergence of the term in early 2004.

The personalised learning policy originates from shifts in the drivers of the national economy:

"Customisation in business is where goods or services are tailor-made, in contrast to the mass production of good or services. Mass customisation means providing goods or services at the prices of mass production. Personalised learning is an educational version of this, and means meeting the needs of every learner more fully than we have in the past." (Hargreaves, 2005)

The resultant trend is a move away from the industrial economy to a knowledge economy where it is essential to equip citizens with a wide range of personal, social, thinking and learning skills.

Like historical shifts in educational philosophy, the widespread implementation of personalised learning is being driven by Government through policy changes and forms a part of an agenda that places the citizen at the heart of public services. Personalised learning is already regarded as much more than an initiative; rather it is considered as a fundamental catalyst for transforming schools.

Space for Personalised Learning aims to support all schools looking at evolving the physical environment in response to personalised learning. Working with a wide variety of pilot schools, the project will look at a series of physical interventions, both small scale and large scale, that can be implemented to support personalised learning in a variety of practical forms.

The tools and methodologies used, as well as case studies, research and preliminary outputs, will all be published as we go along on this site and through project partners, to support current schools going through BSF or PCP schemes.