New kinds of data-driven activities carried out in school configure people, practices and pedagogies.  “Datafication”, or the transformation of the social and natural world into machine-readable format (Williamson, Bayne and Shay, 2020), signifies how complex digital systems that sort, order and classify, are routinely used to predict and channel behaviours in ever-more intensive and opaque ways. The impact of datafication in the schools sector, however, has largely been examined in speculative terms; this paper offers a detailed ethnographic analysis of how data are enacted in schools, focusing on the formation of new data epistemologies of schooling.

Internationally, datafication has intensified the amount of pupil information collected, modelled and analysed by a plethora of technologies supporting teaching, learning and school administration. The government of education in systems around Europe and beyond has become a system of governance in which non-state organisations and commercial actors have gained agency in decisions over the purpose and direction of a public domain under market conditions (Ozga, 2009).

The marketisation of education via quantification is considered to have changed both pedagogies and people (Ball, 2003). A focus on attainment, targets and comparative metrics occasioned the rise of “teaching to the test” and a concentration of instructional effort on students at examination pass borderlines (Hardy and Lewis, 2017). With burgeoning amounts of data to grapple with, teachers are now encouraged, not simply to become data-literate, but to translate the “profoundly emotional and human process” (Castañeda and Williamson, 2021) of education into a series of calculative operations (Grant, 2022; Selwyn et. al., 2021).

A focus on metrics is significant for the meaning and quality of education as it teaches a “hidden curriculum” (Mertala, 2020) that coveys a reductive episteme of knowing by numbers. Jarke and Breiter assert that,

The education sector is one of the most noticeable domains affected by datafication, because it transforms not only the ways in which teaching and learning are organised but also the ways in which future generations (will) construct reality with and through data. (2019, p.1)

To examine the formation of new data epistemologies in the secondary school sector, this paper is informed by sociomaterial theory and post-qualitative methodology (Orlikowski, 2007, Lather and St Pierre, 2013). Sociomaterial or relational ontologies emphasise the performative nature of measurement that works to constitute the phenomena it purports to represent. Such an appreciation means that no neutral position of exteriority exists from which to observe, analyse and report on things, including the research itself. Instead, the observer, the observed and the means of observation are combined in constitutive relations that collapse the distinction between ontology and epistemology and call for rethinking humanist binaries and traditional research boundaries.

Post-qualitative sensibilities are cultivated because they trouble notions of a privileged human subject and data as neutral and straightforwardly representative. They recognise the fallibility and partiality of all knowledge accounts and attempt to work productively with uncertainty and multiplicity. The post-qualitative is intent on unpicking the “epistemic codes” underpinning traditional qualitative research and all knowledge regimes “which posit ‘truth about’ and ‘power over’” (Taylor, 2017, p.313) and is apposite for research into epistemic claims for education.

Post-qualitative inquiry has been called an uncomfortable social science (Taylor, 2017), not least for urging that research “begins with an encounter with the real, not with method” (St Pierre, 2019, p.11). My encounter with the real took the form of a case study in one, unexceptional, English secondary school over the course of several months in order to experience how data were actually done on the ground. I used ethnographic means of inquiry that included semi-structured interviews, observations, and “scavenging” techniques (Seaver, 2017, p.7). The latter entailed maintaining a presence in school in the hope of participating in ad-hoc conversations and fortuitous happenings. Post-qualitative inquiry proposes the rethinking of these activities so that ethnography is less about entering the subjective lifeworlds of individuals, and more about exploring what relations, including my own, come together to produce the research and the phenomenon under study. The ethnographic approach responded to calls to “interview objects” (Adams and Thompson, 2011) by enlisting material and technical phenomena as research participants. The imbrication of the social and technical as a “sociotechnical assemblage” (Williamson and Perrotta, 2018) required being open to the agency of material items and attentive to human interactions with technical systems, noting the latter’s invitational design which privileges certain operations over others. Decuypere’s “walkthrough methods” enabling “the unfolding of highly intricate details” (2021, p.76) of technical systems was drawn upon. The process reveals the intentions of platform designers by focusing on implied usage and was instructive for understanding “how platform interfaces configure specific types of users … in highly determined ways” by a coded “grammar of action” (ibid, p.76). Being alert to idiosyncratic system use was productive for apprehending how users and technologies “enfold and unfold in each other” (ibid, p.76/7) in the enactment of data practices.

It is difficult to draw definitional boundaries around data activities as they pervade much of what happens at school. However, the post-qualitative ethnographic examination has surfaced a range of sociomaterial ways in which routine practices such as attendance and assessment are being affected by data activities and epistemologies. Attendance monitoring was far from a straightforward audit of who was in or out of school. The practice was a melee of people, programs and policies, interwoven with elements of care and control. The school’s conscientious attempts to produce accurate attendance numbers entailed the recruitment of students into the registration assemblage. Pupils were enlisted as runners chasing anomalous attendance marks across school in dataflow subroutines. Exploring the school’s assessment practices, book stickers emerged as potent material-discursive devices. Sticky labels displaying a neat grid of pupil data were adhered to the front of every pupil exercise book. Following the social life of the measures on these mini material data dashboards revealed the underlying structures of thought that earned them a place in school. Stickers were both unpeeling and holding fast: the data they circulated in inexpensive, analogue form were imprecise and often resisted, but the data epistemology that held them in place – one that found convenience in the school’s average performance for ease of comparison – was considered to remain as long as the school was judged by its numbers. The analysis has revealed how a powerful data epistemology is enacted in complex sociomaterial practices. Beyond the immediate context of the study, this indicates how datafied schooling in Europe and beyond benefits from ethnographic study in order to understand its pervasive and subtle effects in everyday practice.

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