Material conditions for European education, pedagogy and learning are undergoing considerable changes. The Knowledge Economy discourse has pushed education higher up on the government agenda, and, consequently, this policy area has become increasingly important to govern. In recent years, governing regimes in education that emphasize performance management and accountability have been introduced in several countries (Ozga et al. 2011, Altrichter & Merki, 2010). As such, the scope and formats within which national policies can be conducted have changed radically, and this has transformed the daily practices of teachers, researchers, students and pupils and their parents. Various types of assessment tools which produce ‘data’ on learning outcomes and student performance is supposed to provide a basis for generating information to be used for policy making (Datnow 2011, Fuller 2008), and indeed for educational practice. However, tensions of different functions and expectations considering data use challenge school leaders’ and teachers’ daily work. For example, there is a dilemma concerning how data can illuminate important problems in education and lead to productive development processes and resource allocations at various authority levels on the one side, but also how data may produce a limited view on problems to solve by the local actors resulting in a restricted view on what processes to engage in and the type of measures to initiate. These tensions lead to empirical questions for research regarding which expectations are formulated in policy and how data is actually produced and used at different levels of a school system. Examining accountability policies, policies on data production and data use in education and their implementation in education practice can illuminate the tension described. In policies considering data use and learning outcomes as accountability images from appropriate teaching, and how it can be measured, become visible. In investigating how teachers produce the data required, we might be able to see how teachers relate to such images. In other words, by investigating the tensions described teachers’ professional identity making might become observable, through how teachers adjust to the data produced by their practice and through the data requirements and expectations of other actors, including policy makers. Moreover, such analyses will also emphasize that there are different forms of data, policy data and professional data, but although different in nature that still aim to measure teachers’ performances. The Nordic countries have in various ways introduced a relatively new set of public management approaches in education that emphasize the combined power of performance measurement, goal setting, and a growing number of regulations and guidelines for the enhancement of accountability to mobilizing teachers’ efforts and raising student achievement (Fuller, 2008; Mintrop, 2012). This might imply a contradictory mix of support and control on the on the one hand. On the other hand, these are empirical questions in how this mix shapes the teaching profession: will there be at the end a new teaching profession or business as usual? In this symposium, aspects related to learning outcomes and data use and tensions between policy initiatives and policy instruments on the one side, and the educational practices on the other, are explored and discussed from different viewpoints in three papers investigating recent developments in European education policy and teacher professionalism in the different contexts of Norway, Sweden and Germany. These contexts are quite alike due to partly recembling traditions regarding the history of schooling (Telhaug et al. 2006, Prøitz & Aasen 2017), but also display interesting differences regarding the nature of their respective teaching professions.

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