European Educational Research Journal

Educational governance today increasingly needs to be understood as digital educational governance. The monitoring and management of educational systems, institutions and individuals is taking place through digital systems that are normally considered part of the backdrop to conventional policy instruments and techniques of government; technical systems that are brought into being and made operational by certain kinds of actors and organizations, and that are imbued with aims to shape the actions of human actors distributed across education systems and institutions. The aim of the original articles collected in this special issue of the European Educational Research Journal is to bring into the foreground the digital technologies, software packages, database platforms and related forms of technical expertise involved in the rise of digital educational governance. The authors seek to understand how such digital technologies and techniques may be contributing to, or transforming, trends such as governing through data, the globalizing and Europeanizing of educational policy, accountability and performativity, global comparison and benchmarking, and to emerging local, national and supranational objectives.

The article argues that current discussions about governance through data in education can be fruitfully extended through: (1) the establishment of connections with wider debates about the role of commensuration processes and governmentality in the recreation of education systems; (2) greater emphasis on the ‘artefacts’ through which data – increasingly in the form of digital data – is collected, displayed and retrieved; and (3) the strategies of alignment and resistance that social actors adopt to deal with the increase in data availability and capacity for the automated interrogation of that data. The article concludes that these artefacts and strategies are providing a wide set of ‘active’ social actors with new resources in, and arenas for, their struggles for economic as well as social advancement, processes of self-monitoring and also, crucially, of self-formation. The article focuses on the interplay and tensions between governments and bureaucracies, private companies, education institutions, and various types of ‘active’ individuals (the individual customer, the individual manager and the individual worker) in the process of surveillance and recreation of education through digital data.

This article analyses the rise of software systems in education governance, focusing on digital methods in the collection, calculation and circulation of educational data. It examines how software-mediated methods intervene in the ways educational institutions and actors are seen, known and acted upon through an analysis of the methodological complex of Pearson Education’s Learning Curve data-bank and its Center for Digital Data, Analytics and Adaptive Learning. This calls for critical attention to the ‘social life’ of its methods in terms of their historical, technical and methodological provenance; their affordances to generate data for circulation within the institutional circuitry of Pearson and to its wider social networks; their capacity to configure research users’ interpretations; and their generativity to produce the knowledge to influence education policy decisions and pedagogic practices. The purpose of the article is to critically survey the digital methods being mobilized by Pearson to generate educational data, and to examine how its methodological complex acts to produce a new data-based knowledge infrastructure for education. The consequence of this shift to data-based forms of digital education governance by Pearson is a challenge to the legitimacy of the social sciences in the theorization and understanding of learning, and its displacement to the authority of the data sciences.

Educational governance is commonly predicated around the generation, collation and processing of data through digital technologies. Drawing upon an empirical study of two Australian secondary schools, this paper explores the different forms of data-based governance that are being enacted by school leaders, managers, administrators and teachers. These findings illustrate a range of routinized ways in which digital data is being used within schools as a means of accountability. Alongside data regimes associated with the ‘governing by numbers’ enforced by state and federal governments, are smaller-scale accountability procedures and practices initiated ‘in-house’ by school managers and/or teaching staff. While digital technologies are clearly reinforcing wider trends in educational managerialism, the paper also considers the subtle ways that local enactments of such governance are shaped by schools’ relatively unsophisticated data processing technologies and techniques.

The aim of the paper is to contribute to the critical study of digital data use in education, through examination of the processes surrounding school inspection judgements. The interaction between pupil performance data and other (embodied, enacted) sources of inspection judgement is scrutinised and discussed with a focus on the interaction between people (in this case inspectors) and data in the forming of judgements. I look at the changing position, work and personnel of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) in England, drawing on recent Economic and Social Research Council funded research, with an emphasis on changes in the basis of authority claims of personnel (who traditionally operated through elite social networks and knowledges) and the rise of data (especially in its new interactive forms) in order to illustrate how the demands and logics of data production and use influence the performance of authority in school inspections in England, and with some reference to wider developments in Europe.

This article discusses the effects of the datafication and digitalisation of education policy in the context of the Russian Federation. It taps into the policies and practices invented as a result of rising audit cultures and the scientisation and datafication of education governance. These processes turn sites of public examinations into sites of numerical data production on education, and make school systems accountable to data production. The article draws on the notions of power and the non-human object, as developed by Actor-Network-Theory scholars, in order to make sense of the recent introduction of obligatory video surveillance equipment during public examinations. The article argues that demands for accountability and data objectivity have led to a complex surveillance regime – a surveillance assemblage – that leads to intensifying observation through various technical means and new data, i.e. data on data production. Video surveillance is called upon to act as a mediator that translates and holds parts of the fragile assessment-network together by coercing each participant into the role of docile data producer. The introduction of video surveillance manifests and endorses a deep mistrust of the human being, translates data objectivity into a procedural matter and opens up new business opportunities for commercial surveillance and security sectors.

In this paper, I examine the role of human and digital actants in various material and spatial configurations during the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) e-assessment events. It reports on an investigation into how data are produced and subsequently fed into statistical models that in turn produce analyses of skills in ‘centres of calculation’. These data are then used to produce reports, scientific papers, marketing documents and visualizations that profoundly affect how we understand concepts such as literacy or skill. Drawing upon the theoretical resources of Actor Network Theory, this investigation employs a new and innovative methodology, trace ethnography, to follow the distributed agency of hypermobile digital actants. I examine the detail of e-assessment events and interactions between coded technologies and people and how these are translated into statements about what it means to be literate. This, in turn, highlights the role of non-governmental organizations in influencing educational and economic policy-making through the intensification of data production.

Digital technologies in combination with ‘big’ data and predictive analytics are having a significant impact upon professional practices at individual, organisational, national and international levels. The interplay of code, algorithms and big data are increasingly pervasive in the governing, leadership and practices of different professional groups. They are reshaping the relationships between professional grouping and between professionals and their clients/users/students. New forms of accountability and responsibility are emerging as a result of these trends, raising important questions about culpability and decision-making in professional practice. However, to date, despite the introduction of many professional codes on the use of digital data and social media, these issues have received limited examination in research addressing professional education. This article aims to explore some of these trends, how they are manifested in different professions and what might be the educational implications. Our argument is that new digital technologies are reconfiguring professional practice and responsibility, but that the education of professionals has yet to adequately reflect these changes.

This article reports of an ethnographic study conducted in two academic research centers. The article is centrally directed at the role of digital technologies and devices in contemporary academic work, and more particularly at the role of the screen in the daily composition of this work. Three central questions are raised. First, which positional relations do academics need to uphold with the screen in order for the screen to be able to operate? Second, in which forms do these digital devices come into being? Third, which sorts of (in)compatibility between activities are established because of the mutual interplay between academics and screens? By adopting a relational, sociomaterial approach, the study gives an account of the established choreographies that are enacted likewise, provides an overview of the role and operations of the screen in contemporary academic work, and analyzes which sorts of time and space are generated likewise.