Personalisation of learning is a brilliant idea. So is its partner, differentiation. They are great ideas. But I have come to the conclusion that you simply can’t have a completely standardised, one-size-fits-all, uniform education system while delivering a fully differentiated diet for each and every student, where they develop at their own pace, following their own paths and passions, suitable to their own particular talents and abilities. But, the idea has been sold, and for a long time, that you can - that personalisation and inclusivity can go hand in hand.

However, some education professionals are questioning the status quo. Some are beginning to question whether you can have a fully inclusive education system and strive for personalisation.

The Michaela Comunity School in London has adopted instructional delivery as its primary form of teaching. Staff there unashamedly “teach to the middle” in a style known to teaching veterans as “chalk and talk”, reframed for the trendy Teach Firster. They’ve rejected learning styles, colour-coded worksheets and discovery or enquiry-based learning journeys in favour of something much more simple: the power of the lecture, the power of talking and listening and question and answer has taken precedence.

At the opposite end of the spectrum to Michaela, we have schools that have asked teachers to spend hours and hours differentiating everything, from worksheets, to everyday conversations with individual students. They have asked them to design schemes of work that have different strands for different pupils. The desire for both inclusion and personalisation has meant asking teachers for more and more. Of course, that’s not to say that these schools don’t also achieve good results and aren’t “good schools”, but that’s not the issue.

Selective memories

So, when the new education secretary Justine Greening started talking about selective schools again in her first interview, she might have been hitting on a wider debate: if it’s not possible to personalise and differentiate effectively in a 100 per cent inclusive system, is the next best thing to differentiate the system from the top down?

It wouldn’t solve the problem, but would it at least help?

Some get positively mad at the mere mention of the term “grammar school” and start shouting “elitism” and “privilege” while ignoring the “differentiation” going on within the current system. When we select pupil premium students in a class or cohort and ask teachers to highlight them on their lesson plans, aren’t we being “selective”?

When we judge schools on the gap between the attainment of those whose parents happen to fall below a certain income bracket and those that don’t, aren’t we being selective?

When students who receive free school meals are taken off timetable for “special intervention” and when extra teachers are employed to “ensure their progress”, is that being selective? When “more able and talented” students go on special trips or hear from guest speakers, is that being selective?

Is this all OK because this is happening in the state system in schools called comprehensives?

Not so ‘inclusive’ system

There is still a lot of prejudice within our “inclusive” system that isn’t necessarily helping the country or the young people in it. And it isn’t just about the idea of academically selective schools but also proper, skilled apprenticeships. Both of these routes or pathways have narrowed and in some cases, closed completely.

All roads now lead to the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) for every single child in this country. The arts subjects are being decimated. Drama, art, and design and technology are being relegated as “not as important” or “not as relevant”. But these subjects and the skills they develop are going to be so crucial to our economy in the next 20 years.

In a nationally differentiated system, Progress 8 and the EBacc could be applied to those schools in the selective, academic arena. Other schools could be completely free to create a curriculum and an ethos that embraces a much wider range of subjects and skills.

Further to this, could we once again have a route into proper, skilled apprenticeships at 16? For plumbers, electricians, car mechanics and bricklayers. The kind of professions that are dying. Did you wince when I used the term “professions”? Have you been taken in by the idea pushed by Michael Gove and Nicky Morgan that being able to fix an electrical circuit is less valid than getting a B at A-level English literature?

Forget the politics and prejudice

If so, think again, because with leaving the EU, our need for skilled tradespeople is going to become chronic. So, an apprenticeship at 16 is “route A: the first choice and an inherently good one - financially and otherwise. “Route B” is academic and, within that, selective schools are restored. Let’s erase the phrase “grammar school” from the dictionary because there is nothing better about a selective school, it’s just different. We need a level playing field of options for students. Like I said, let’s take the politics and the prejudice out of it.

This is not the 1970s. Universities aren’t free any more but hundreds of thousands more young people are ending up in them, some doing degrees in surfing, many feeling lost because they simply didn’t know there was another path to take. Some may have actually been blocked from pursuing alternatives altogether. Jamie Cullum captures this in his song Twentysomething, a eulogy to the fallacy sold to my generation and perhaps the next. The fallacy being that one route is “the best” for all students:

“After years of expensive education
A car full of books and anticipation
I’m an expert on Shakespeare and that’s a hell of a lot
But the world don’t need scholars as much as I thought”

Thomas Rogers is a teacher who runs rogershistory.com and tweets at @RogersHistory

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