Voices and Values: defining the personalisation agenda
The intended audience for this compilation of 20 essays on the future of personalised learning comprises 'policy makers, research practitioners and experts, teaching practitioners, learners and business people' (p 110). It is also an important text for schools, local authorities and educational organisations seeking to develop personalised learning through a process of informed professional development.

Certainly the range of contributors reflects the diversity of interest within this increasingly important area. From Tim Brighouse (who writes the Foreword) and keynote essayist Professor Diane Laurillard (head of DfES e-learning strategy unit and Chair in Learning with Digital Technologies at the Institute of Education/Birkbeck College's London Knowledge Lab) to, for example, Graeme Atherton (Aim Higher), John West-Burnham (NCSL), Derek Wise (headteacher and author), Niel McLean (QCA) and Alistair McNaught (teacher and advisor), the authorship combines movers and shakers with leading education practitioners and project managers to provide an authoritative perspective on the complex agenda for personalised learning facing schools and institutions today.

Having said that, however, it should also be stated that reading through the book from cover to cover is probably not the most beneficial way for its potential for promoting effective organisational change to be fully realised. What is immediately clear to the reviewer (reading as I did from cover to cover), is that when the information is consumed in this linear manner personalisation is both a dizzying and also quite a slippery concept to evaluate. As John West-Burnham's essay concedes, 'personalisation is still a complex and elusive theory and its full implications are not fully understood.' (p 25) What is needed, particularly for the purposes of professional assimilation within a developmental context is a more strategic unpacking of the views expressed so as to stimulate informed debate and promote synergy.

For example: is personalisation about ICT and the potential of ICT to allow for flexible learning pathways and Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) of the sort being promoted by reforms to the 14-19 curriculum?

Is it about individualised learning and assessment for learning; the ideas of learning styles, of Œpoly-valent learners, of metacognitive awareness of learning needs and of the developing ownership of learning by the learner?

Or is it about establishing access to lifelong learning, of cross-organisational and inter-personal collaboration and the transmission of power from the tutor to the tutee in a way which challenges the traditional model of the school and the classroom? If so then is there a need to consider the professional, social and quasi-philosophical implications of a vision for education in which new technologies look set to replace or displace the traditional role of the teacher and the means through which values are transmitted to learners become the responsibility of systems designers?

Or might it simply ­ and somehow comfortingly ­ be seen as an extension of the insights formulated by Vygotsky and Bruner in the last century through which we have come to understand that learners are actively involved in trying to make sense of the world around them, and of other people's construction of it and that until it has been personalised ­ integrated into a personal theory or personal structure of competence ­ nothing new can be said to have been learned. (Helen Beetham p 17) In this sense, might personalisation be seen as the internalisation of learning through differentiation drawing on the technologies available to a 21st century teacher?

The answer, of course, is that it is all these things and more and that this points to the way in which the book can best be used ­ as a source of perspectives that can be easily isolated, removed and juxtaposed to stimulate professional debate and promote organisational resolutions to the tensions inherent within the current debate. In this, the text provides voices which the school leader can extract to steer and stimulate CPD towards the establishment of an informed vision for professional and organisational development in this area of policy. In this context, each short (and clearly defined) essay provides a palliative to any over-simplistic professional development formula by encouraging informed debate of the type revealed in the transcription of a focus group discussion on the topic which forms the last essay in the book.

In conclusion, de Freitas and Yapp¹s editorial work allows any school, institution, Local Authority or educational service provider the stimulus material to develop its own ethos and planning strategy around the topic of personalised learning. In this context, the last word should go to Derek Wise, headteacher and Accelerated Learning author, whose voice within the many competing calls for a definition of personalised learning is for the primary need for each organisation to develop its own bespoke formulation depending on the learning need of its own students and the aspirations of the institution itself, arguing that ³the last thing we want is for the government or indeed anyone else to come up with a definition of personalised learning. This is a perspective which is sure to resonate with many leaders of learning across the country.