Often, contemporary educational reforms are not structural in nature, but rather follow a piecemeal approach, advancing through the adoption of new policy instruments. Such instruments are data-intensive, they set standards of appropriate behavior and best practice among teachers, school principals and school providers, and they are tied to incentives and sanctions. Schools, conceived as autonomous managerial units, often enter contractual relationships with public authorities and are encouraged to engage in continual data-use, assessment and improvement cycles (Authors, 2021). Despite their piecemeal approach, contemporary reforms have a great transformatory potential (Author et al., 2019). They can alter schools’ ethos and core organizational practices, the interactions and decision-making capacity of key educational actors, and change organizational routines, and modify main objectives and practices of teaching work. The use of such instruments is often enforced by regulatory power, e.g. when routines and procedures embedded in quality assurance are regulated. Thus, governance instruments connected to routines and procedures can gain importance and develop a regulatory status themselves even if they only represent means that aim to fulfil quality assurance. In this paper, we analyse how policy instruments structure and regulate school practices enable combinations of performance-based, contractual and legal accountabilities. We apply a political sociology of policy instruments which implies analyzing the logics of instrument choice, as well as tracing the development of policy instruments. We pay particular attention to how policy instruments incentivize the generation of new constituencies, which are comprised of actors “oriented towards developing, maintaining and expanding a specific instrumental model of governing” (Simons & Voß, 2018. p. 31). The analysis draws on data from empirical studies on datafication in education and the enactment of accountability policy in various educational settings, such as Chile, England, the Netherlands, Spain, and Norway. Based on existing case studies, the use of policy instruments in schools are re-analysed and compared, and thus providing a rich basis for generating new knowledge and discussing implications for theories of education governance. The preliminary analysis shows that accountability systems have become central in the governance of multiple public sectors and domains but are becoming increasingly sophisticated and adaptable to a complex and fluid world. In education, most of accountability systems assemble different policy instruments such as large-scale assessments, targets, data infrastructures and contracts between public administrations and schools as well as between actors within the schools such as teachers and students, and regulated routines and procedures.

Authors (2019) Authors (2021) Lascoumes, P., & Le Gales, P. (2007). Introduction: Understanding public policy through its instruments—from the nature of instruments to the sociology of public policy instrumentation. Governance, 20(1), 1–21. Simons, A., & Voß, J.-P. (2018). The concept of instrument constituencies: Accounting for dynamics and practices of knowing governance. Policy and Society, 37(1), 14–35.