ABSTRACT
The journey of learning styles from policy initiative to pedagogic pariah raises a number of questions for education. Learning styles have become something of a bete noire in educational policy circles. Personalisation was a policy concept concerned with the inclusion of service users in the planning of provision, introduced by the publication of Personalisation through Participation, written for think tank Demos by Charles Leadbeater, a Demos associate and once senior adviser to the Downing Street policy unit. David Miliband clearly links personalisation to "individual learning styles," in effect transforming them from what was an unpromising research concept to a lynchpin for turning personalisation into a workable educational practice. The most widely used model refers to visual, auditory and kinaesthetic preferences, and though there is little evidence that it has any meaningful use in any particular research field, it has nonetheless been adopted by business and other fields, including education.
