What a “personalised programme” means when it means something
Meda Căpîlna on what the international research shows about personalising learning for children: what holds up, what has been disproved, and how it translates into a real programme.
In most of the offers I come across, “personalised programme” means somebody asked the parent what the child likes and put it in the title. That is not personalisation. It is a politeness.
I studied Communication and Public Relations, so I recognise an emptied word when I see one. And it seems worth saying plainly what the research shows, because it confirms neither the sceptics nor the enthusiasts.
What has been disproved
Start with the claim the industry repeats most and the research settled long ago: learning styles.
The idea that one child is “visual”, another “auditory” and a third “kinaesthetic”, and that teaching should be matched to the label, has no support. This is not an open dispute in the literature — it is a closed question. Tailoring instruction to a supposed learning style does not improve outcomes. Children have preferences, certainly. Preferences do not predict which method helps them learn.
If someone sells you a programme built on testing your child’s learning style, they are selling you something that was tested and failed.
What holds up, with conditions
The Education Endowment Foundation — the British organisation that synthesises evidence in education — keeps a separate entry for individualised instruction. Their conclusion is not “it works” or “it doesn’t”, but “it depends what you actually do”. There is evidence that digital technology can deliver individualised instruction effectively; there are also versions of the idea that produce nothing.
RAND studied American schools implementing personalised learning and found improvements in achievement regardless of the level students started from — with the explicit caveat that the results need confirming through more rigorous experimental designs. In a randomised controlled trial published in 2025 in Kenyan pre-primary classrooms, digital personalised learning improved literacy and numeracy outcomes.
A systematic review published in 2026, covering the work from 2019 to 2025, reaches the conclusion I find most useful of all: different groups of children follow different trajectories and respond differently to the same personalised interventions. In other words, uniform personalisation is a contradiction in terms. What works is personalisation that is aware of its context.
What that means for a two-hour workshop
Here is the translation, because the studies above are run in schools, over long periods, with digital tools. I work with groups of fifteen to thirty children, for a few hours, sometimes once.
At that scale, personalisation cannot mean an individual pathway for every child. It would be a lie to claim otherwise. What it can mean, and what I actually do:
The programme is built around the group, not the age. Twenty seven-year-olds from a class that has worked outdoors a lot and twenty seven-year-olds leaving the classroom for the first time do not need the same session. Age is the crudest variable available, and if it is the only one you use, you have a package, not a programme.
The activity holds several depths at once. One child cuts and glues. Another child, at the same table, sorts, counts and explains what they sorted. That is not two activities — it is one activity that allows two levels. This is the practical difference between differentiation and splitting children into ability groups.
What is not working changes during the session, not after it. If half the group has drifted off after ten minutes, the plan is wrong, not the children. A good programme has minute eleven already planned for.
Why it matters to a school
When a school asks me for a programme for the Școala Altfel week, the first thing I ask back is not the number of children but what those classes have been doing so far. Not as a formality. A group used to working on projects can start straight away; a group used only to short tasks needs a different ramp.
The difference between “adapted” and “adapted on paper” shows within the first five minutes, and the children feel it before the adults do.
What I do not promise
I do not promise measured results. I have not run studies, and what I describe above is field observation, not data. The research cited here concerns long-term school programmes, not workshops; I use it to know which direction to build in, not as proof of what I do.
What I can promise is that the programme you receive is written for your classes, and that if it does not fit, it changes beforehand rather than afterwards.
Sources
- Education Endowment Foundation — Teaching and Learning Toolkit: Individualised instruction
- Pane JF, Steiner ED, Baird MD, Hamilton LS — How Does Personalized Learning Affect Student Achievement? RAND Corporation, Research Brief RB9994
- Redefining personalized learning in the artificial intelligence era: an updated systematic review from 2019 to 2025 — Smart Learning Environments, 2026
- Digital personalised learning to improve literacy and numeracy outcomes: a randomised controlled trial in Kenyan pre-primary classrooms — Educational Research, 2025