In recent decades, school assessment and improvement have increasingly become two policy imperatives and, at the same time, two of the most discussed issues in the field of education. Debate and research have developed around the forms of governing they contribute to enact (Ball 2015). The introduction of calculative dispositifs to assess and improve schools, learning achievements and professionals is a key trend in the process of Europeanization of education that develops through the circulation of knowledge, artefacts, actors and techniques across multi-scalar policy spaces.

The paper explores the way in which this process of circulation has taken shape in the Italian education space, both inside and outside the ‘Brussels bubble’ (Saurugger & Mérand 2010; Favell & Guiraudon 2009). In particular, we present an effective history of the recent establishment of the National School Evaluation System (SNV) – i.e. the Italian ‘machinery’ to produce numerical data on the quality of education, schools and professionals - as a technology of government that links new forms of evaluation to old improvement aims and affects the way school is thought and done, head teachers’ practices, teachers’ knowledge, formative practices and student learning (Herman et al. 2015).

Our work is not concerned with assessment and improvement per se, but with the cultural and value-based implications of what we term an assessment game (Basford and Bath 2014), which defines the strategy of governing in the Italian education system. Thus, we answer to the following questions:

• What kind of knowledge(s) are mobilized and required in the playing of “the assessment game”?
• Who are the improvement actors engaged in this performance-play? That is, what are the forms, the micro devices, the technologies through which the improvement aims take shape and emerge?
• How the aforementioned dimensions (knowledges, actors and technologies) intertwine each other and emerge?
• What kind of effects they produce on teachers’ knowledges, pedagogical contents and formative practices?

According with the above questions, our study combines two different traditions of thought and research: the Governmentality studies (Dean 2010), and the critique to the school improvement movement (Thrupp 2005). Starting from the Foucauldian concept of ‘governmentality’, we look at the processes in focus as heterogeneous assemblages of knowledge(s), technologies and actors. That is, dimensions constituted and intertwined each other by both human and non-human actors, who link unconnected things “lending reality and consistency to larger, more complex objects” (Desrosières 1998, in Piattoeva 2015). On the one hand, New Public Management knowledges and technologies (standards, outputs, performance, accountability, and so on) are embedded within the educational texture (Serpieri et. al. 2015); on the other hand, new spaces for improvement strategies and practices are produced and widened. In addition, this trend - interpreted as part of a neo-liberal process of re-culturing (Ball and Youdell 2008) of the Italian Education System - unfolds through contents and formative practices, learning processes and knowledge(s), which define knowable and unknowable things. Audit, performance, accountability have important implications for pedagogical practice. So, referring to those studies (Herman et.al. 2015), which highlight the relationship between teacher knowledge, assessment practice and learning processes, we analyse the re-culturing of the educational space. 

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