This study explores the question of what might be a model of effective leadership for pedagogical change in early childhood education in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Drawing on a framework of gateways for personalising learning constructed by Hargreaves (2004a) and Engestrom's (1999) Activity theory, a case study of a professional development programme is analysed. Entrypoints or gateways for teachers in three early childhood centres to the professional development programme are identified, as are gateways for sustained involvement and continued learning opportunities. The study uses unstructured interviews with a narrative inquiry approach to hear the teachers' stories and the findings of the study are presented in a narrative style in order to capture these voices. The major findings from the study indicate that professional development is a complex interweaving of voices and intentions. There are three key elements of the ongoing personalising learning as a result of involvement in the professional development programme: distributed leadership, teacher voice, and community. The context of early childhood provided unique definitions of the gateways and common elements were found in identifying the entrypoints and features of sustained involvement. The study implies that effective leadership is distributed across the community and the sustaining features of the professional development programme need to be elements of any provision of professional development intent on personalising learning for pedagogical change.

This small-scale qualitative, action research study sought to establish the efficacy of using the Individualised Education Programme (IEP) as an assistive tool towards the differentiation of reading programmes for young, gifted and talented readers. Despite a growing awareness about the importance of curriculum differentiation for all students, research indicates how little some classroom teachers do to meet the needs of gifted readers. The literature reviewed reveals how the prolonged mismatching of instructional reading programmes to the academic and emotional maturity of the gifted reader may well result in underachievement, and a diminished opportunity to learn how to react to challenge. In November 2006, the New Zealand Ministry of Education launched its personalising learning initiative, which promotes the active participation of students in their education by creating their own learning pathways. Students are encouraged to articulate their learning needs and preferences, and set goals in collaboration with their parents and family/whanau and teachers. With its underlying principles based on collaboration and communication, together with its seemingly flexible structure, this study utilised the IEP as a personalising learning framework for young gifted and talented readers, and as a differentiation tool for their teachers. Over a five month period, the researcher worked alongside three Year Two/Three teachers from an urban, decile five primary school as they each identified one gifted reader from their classes, and together with the student and the student's parents, set about planning and implementing an IEP, using strategies and approaches suggested by the literature as the most apposite for gifted readers. Data was gathered through in-class observations, participants' journals, focus group meetings, IEP meetings, and semi-structured interviews. This study reveals the use of the IEP holds great promise as a differentiation tool towards the personalisation of learning programmes for young, gifted readers. Each student attended his or her own IEP meetings, indicated their learning preferences and needs, helped to set his or her own learning goals, and assessed their own achievement using the IEP goal indicators. Significantly, for the teachers involved in this project, the IEPs proved not only useful as qualitatively differentiated planning frameworks for the students in the study, but many of the goals and strategies used proved pertinent for all children, in particular, for the 'top' reading groups. In this regard, IEPs proved to be 'work-smarter' tools for the teachers involved, serving as planning blueprints for the most able readers in their classes, thereby creating inclusive rather than exclusive conditions for the gifted readers. Furthermore, the insights gained by the teachers involved into the needs of their gifted readers ultimately challenged their personal teaching philosophies, and resulted in changes to their teaching practices for their gifted students.

The New Labour government’s (1997-2010) policy of personalised learning was announced as an idea ‘exciting’ the profession and promising ‘radical implications’ for the shape of education in England. The policy attracted much debate and criticism and its enactment is a site worthy of research. This study makes a contribution to knowledge through researching the rarely heard stories of young people in this policy enactment. It makes a further contribution to policy scholarship through the interplay of the data from school practices and moral philosophy drawn from Alasdair MacIntyre.Qualitative interviews and focus group activities were conducted with young people in three different secondary schools in order to understand their stories of personalised learning some two years into New Labour’s third term of government. To understand more of the context for the stories of the young people, some strategic actors in policy dissemination were interviewed, as were the headteachers of the three schools.Personalised learning promised to engage the voice of the learner in learning practices. The research finds a young peoples’ story that is consistently one of a mute and invisible identity within the schools. An argument is presented that the purposes of schools ought to be judged on standards of excellence definitive of, and extended by, a concept of virtues. A distinction is made between effectiveness in producing exam results and a richer sense of excellence in education practice. It is argued that virtues that define standards of excellence at the institutional level of practice can enrich and prefigure wider concepts of justice than are contained in policy. Young peoples’ stories in this research indicate that, contrary to policy ideals, they often perceived unfairness and arbitrariness in their school experiences. Personalised learning needs to be set within the narrative of the personalisation of public services: a reforming rubric, employing the motif of the citizen-consumer as a proposition about social justice and modernisation. New Labour’s ideology and models of governance are explored and related to the testimony of headteachers to understand more about the young peoples’ perceptions. Literatures are drawn upon to place personalisation in a historical context, linking it to moral orders of contemporary social imaginaries. New Labour made a case for personalised learning as furthering the cause of social justice and is thus a policy in need of ethical examination. Following MacIntyre, it is argued that modernity has left few moral resources by which to evaluate the personal, but the experiences of young people suggested that a richer moral agency is glimpsed within their stories of schooling. The social practice at the level of schools is thus critical but requires policy to enable ethical spaces for schools to re-invigorate their purposes. I argue that in the light of some critical fault lines, such as neoliberalism and a reconfiguration of tiers of local governance, personalisation as a ‘modernising’ policy proposition could do little to extend the goods of schooling beyond some narrow conceptions of effectiveness.