The production of global metrics by International Organisations has not only penetrated the transnational education policy field; it has also become an integral mode of the ways International Organisations interconnect. Through their collaborative practices of quantification and commensuration, International Organisations are both constituting new realities and being reconstituted themselves. Thus, the dominance of global measurement regimes has profound implications for the ways International Organisations interact, and for the environments these new interrelationships come to generate. 

How is one to make sense of this emerging reality? The embryonic –but rapidly deepening– alliances between International Organisations to find global solutions to global crises, is an opportune moment for a symposium discussion that explores the labour of the joint production of education metrics. Further, the proposed symposium will examine the ways this labour reconfigures interdependencies between International Organisations, and hence the field of European and global education governance itself. We will go beyond the role and impact of International Organisations through ‘governing by numbers’: instead, we bring together education historical and sociological perspectives in order to cast light on the role metrics play in re-shaping the data collectors themselves.

Although there have been some in-depth studies of the impact of measurement on education reforms in Europe and globally, little attention has been paid to those early, yet crucial, venues, actors and activities that determine processes of problematisation (the construction of education ‘problems’) and institutionalisation (the moment these ‘problems’ enter institutional agendas and become stabilised). Third, and most important, our starting point is that numbers and (international) organisations have come to be mutually constitutive. Numbers move: this seemingly simple, yet unique quality has created a fluidity between internal organisational structures and external environments, as well as amongst IOs themselves. Hence, going beyond classic organisational sociology’s distinction between internal structures and external contingencies and environments, this symposium will use a range of empirical research to explore how numbers –with their qualities to simplify, stabilise and travel- reconfigure relationships, dependencies and structures of organisations and education policy fields in fresh and politically salient ways; in other words, we will examine how numbers come to govern them. 

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