The realm of UK education policy may appear to be an unlikely site for an analysis of the emerging objects, subjects and mediums of publicness, since schools are often characterised as particularly fixed or static spaces that have not changed radically since the inception of mass schooling in the 19th century. However, recent reforms in education policy point towards the emergence of new ways of talking and thinking about the public value of education, new forms of educational governance, and a new settlement between the ideals of the public, person and citizen – both as they are imagined through the education system, and as they are lived in teachers’ and young people's everyday experiences of schooling. This chapter considers two such reforms: personalisation and citizenship education, which, when explored side by side, throw light on some of the ambiguities between pessimistic discourses of decline and optimistic discourses of originality (Newman and Clarke, 2009, ch 1) in academic accounts of publics. These ambiguities tend to remain underplayed by critical analysis of current educational trends in the UK.

Personalisation is currently ‘the big idea’ in school-level education policy in England (Pollard and James, 2004, p 5), and is part of a wider discourse about the personal that sees education, family, health, social and youth justice policies coalesce around the idea of personally tailored services that involve the individual more actively in the service relationship (and, it is argued, contribute to strategies of ‘responsibilisation’ of the self: Cutler et al, 2007; Ferguson, 2007). The promotion of ‘choice and voice’ (Leadbeater, 2004; Miliband, 2006) is thus presented as a challenge to paternalistic approaches in the public services and is associated with an ‘enabling’ state. This signifies a shift from the state as public service provider to a role as broker of various public, private and voluntary sector services, and education is one sector in which this shift has been particularly marked. However, while personalisation may appear to re-imagine education as a personal goal as opposed to a public ‘good’, when considered alongside concurrent policy directives such as the introduction of citizenship education in England, its rationale, practices and effects become much less straightforward.