Educational data, including test data and other types of performance data, as well as accounting data, register data, and survey data, have for a long time been used to compare students, schools, and countries (Grek, 2009; Sellar & Lingard, 2018). Contemporarily, the use of educational data and data technologies in the governance of public education is changing, if not rising. These data are now subject to algorithmic processing and modelling, such as clustering and forecasting. Measurements of progression over time, prolongations or projections of the past into the future (Adams, Murphy, & Clarke, 2009), and the identification of future risks all seek to control the future via timely policy or management responses in the present. Data are furthermore used to create institutional aspirations (Lewis, 2018) or policymaking rooted in fear of the future (Webb & Gulson, 2012), and to constitute imagined communities and common pasts (Piattoeva & Tröhler, 2019). In other words, the public governanceof education via data is permeated by temporalities such as progression and potentiality in relation to the formation of societies, populations, and individuals.

This double symposium explores the temporal dimensions of the use and impact of educational data in the governance of education theoretically, conceptually, and methodologically (Lingard, 2021).The symposium theorizes time and temporality in relation to the use of data in educational governance by drawing on post-structuralist, socio-material, and new materialist concepts of time as enacted in policy and data practices and as productive of educational realities (Adam, 1998; Decuypere, Hartong, & van de Oudeweetering, 2022; Ratner, 2020). The symposium problematizes conventional understandings of time and temporality by discussing both embedded policy conceptions of time, power struggles over and in time, shifting temporalities of educational governance, the production of futures and pasts through various knowledge practices, temporal practices of control and optimization with reference to the future, and time as a mechanism of governance.

By presenting historical and contemporary case studies spanning across education policy, educational organization and management, and teacher practices, the symposium unpacks various aspects of the temporality of educational governance with data. These include for example the promissory futures of datafication and digitalization; the role of data displaying risky futures as a mobilizer for urgent and/or cautious policy and management decisions; the politics of time aided by the datafication of time; and the temporalities of performance measurement and teacher practices, encompassing both simultaneity, acceleration, immediacy, and hesitation. Through these case studies, time in educational governance with data emerges as both an object or asset that can be possessed and managed in the everyday practices of education, a structuring mechanism that education can be managed and govern through, and an analytical lenses for the study of temporalized modalities of educational governance.

Methodologically, the case studies include historical and ethnographic methodologies as well as policy studies and discourse analysis, and the methods used encompass interviews, observations, platform walkthroughs, and document studies. The case studies span across Denmark, Norway, Finland, Estonia, and transnational policy contexts. Through this polyvalent approach, the symposium aims at exploring the temporal dimensions of governing education with data from a variety of contexts and perspectives, with the aim of generating synthesizing conceptualizations that may push the research field forward. These include ‘datafied temporalities’, indicating how data are used to create temporalities with governing effects in education, and ‘temporal modalities of data practices’, indicating how data practices in educational governance affect temporalities of governance and teacher practices. With these conceptualizations, the double symposium unpacks an emerging research agenda in educational governance research.

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