Significant transformations in the ways education has been governed in recent decades include the diversification of actors involved in education policy and provision, new ways and levels of decision making, and the growing role of quantified data. These changes are inseparable from the emergence of new public policy instruments (Lascoumes & Le Galès, 2007), including digital devices. Indeed, there is a digital layer superimposed on educational policy that must be looked at (Williamson, 2017; Landri, 2018). In this paper we analyse a new national digital platform that serves both local school management and the overall administration of the education system in Portugal.

The view of digital technologies as enablers of data-driven modes of educational regulatory action is persistent in the literature (Ozga, 2008; Williamson, 2017; Landri, 2018; Grek, Maroy & Verger, 2021; Williamson, 2021). The application of technological developments regarding the collection, processing and storage capacity to the education sector has been crucial for the parallel development of quantification, datafication and number-based policies in education. And this to such an extent that the term Digital Education Governance began to be used, precisely to signal the identification of the phenomenon of datafication as a process that has amplified data-driven policy-making (Williamson, 2017).

Although the collection of data on education is nothing new, the application of technological developments to the education sector has open multiple possibilities. The data collected is now endless, the speed at which it is updated and travels through space is extraordinary, the uses to which it can be put are, for these reasons, diverse. Thus, the idea of Digital Education Governance refers to the digital layer added to what has already been taking shape in the governance of education, and this layer certainly includes its own actors, worlds, instruments, specific types of knowledge, possibilities for action. But none of this is entirely new. The emergence of the Digital Education Governance may reinforce the instruments of the new public management and accentuate beliefs in the importance of performance indicators and transparency of schools and educational systems (Landri, 2018).

The process of construction of the European educational space is illustrative of more decentralized and data-focused forms of governance, in a timeline in which it is also possible to observe the growing role of digital technologies. Nowadays, European educational policy is indeed being described as fully inscribed in a digital space of commensuration, within which ‘good’ results are visualised, compared and desired (Landri, 2018). It becomes necessary to observe these digital tools that permeate educational policy – locally, nationally, transnationally – to understand which ideas they carry, to follow the trail of their construction, the worlds that surround them, the actors involved in their doings.

Our contribution focuses in one of such digital objects: Escola 360 (E360). This is a web platform designed and developed by the Portuguese Ministry of Education, together with IT and consultancy companies, that serves both school management and the administration of the education system. E360 is a real-time national platform where an individual file is kept for each student from the time of entrance in the education system. At the same time, it is the software programme that teachers access as they start each class to enter attendance data and lesson summaries, where student enrolment is carried out nation-wide, where ministry staff check individual, local or national data, and many other features.

Drawing on the public policy instrumentation approach (Lascoumes & Le Galès, 2007), the purpose of our study is to understand the dynamics of design and of appropriation of E360, in their cognitive/normative and social dimensions, as analysers of the modes of digital education governance.

Public policy instrumentation approach allows us to conceive, for analytical purposes, the trajectory of a public policy instrument (PPI) as composed of two distinct dynamics: a) the design and development of an instrument, and the justifications for its choice; b) the appropriation by the actors and the effects on the actors, on the problems and even on the instrument itself (Lascoumes & Simard, 2011, p. 16). Similarly, Pollok and Williams (2009), speak of the biography of technological artefacts, to refer to the journey of digital devices from their conception to their appropriation in organisations. This means that not only PPIs but also digital objects have been observed in their trajectories. Also relevant, PPIs are analysed not only as material manifestations, but also as instruments loaded with meaning (Lascoumes & Le Galès, 2007). By not conceiving a PPI as a neutral device, public policy sociology invites us to distinguish and analyse its two dimensions: a cognitive/normative one, which concerns the ideas that a PPI carries along its trajectory; a social one, which concerns the actors, the interactions and the contexts that are involved in its conception and appropriation. Something similar has been stated by authors from other disciplinary fields about any type of digital device (Wajcman, 2015; Kitchin & Dodge, 2011; Beer, 2017). They are not at all neutral, purely technical objects, but rather artefacts carrying meanings that deserve the researcher’s attention. Digital devices are, then, also being analysed as complex objects, in their discursive, technical and social dimensions. Taking all the above in consideration, the study that originates our present contribution looks at E360 as a PPI and follows its trajectory, looking first at the dynamics of design and development and, then, at the dynamics of appropriation, in each paying attention at both its cognitive-normative and social dimensions. Our contribution focuses only in part of this extensive study: the dynamics of design and development of E360. We observed team meetings, collected policy documents which frame the key digital reform moments in the Portuguese public administration and conducted interviews to key actors: the team coordinator and Deputy Director of the Directorate General for Education and Science Statistics, team members working for IT and consultancy companies, and school actors who participated in the E360 development. Inspired by the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse analysis (Keller, 2013), we analysed the documents and interviews applying an immersive and inductive content analysis.

Research results will be presented by focusing on two dimensions. The first one pertains to the cognitive-normative frames surrounding the dynamics of design and development of E360. We will be showing how a double problem of efficiency-effectiveness and of legitimacy emerges in the voices of the political actors, who speak through the analysed documents. Also, we will illustrate how the digital education governance is described by these actors as the construction of a better, well-ordered world through information technologies. And how the actors who participate in the design and development of E360 inscribe this digital instrument in that same construction of a better and well-ordered administration of education in Portugal. These results allow us to discuss how digital education governance in taking shape nationally through E360. The second one pertains to the social dynamics of design and development of E360. We will be showing how the interactions surrounding the development of E360 are well observed as dynamics of translation (Callon, 1986), within a scenario where many actors and also other digital objects are present. These different dynamics reveal a complex process, which unfolds in multiple directions, full of tensions and alliances: ‘approaching’ attracts, constitutes an initial call; ‘convincing’ seduces to stay; ‘converging’ demonstrates and deepens attachment to the project; and ‘diverging’ throughout the cycles means distancing from the objectives of the project. These results allow us to discuss how other actors and digital objects join the game of forces that designs and develops a digital public policy instrument like E360.

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