Deterministic discourses that conceive of technology as independent from other social sectors and consider technological developments to be the cause of far-reaching social transformations are widespread (MacKenzie & Wajcman, 1985; Wyatt, 2008; Wajcman, 2015). Within this contemporary thinking, we can find different narratives, with varying degrees of optimism, amongst which a rhetoric of techno-solutionism stands out, a Promethean vision which sees technology as a human good that contributes inexorably to the emancipation of the species (Martins, 2003).

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 and number-based policies in education. This means digital technologies have been enablers of data-driven policy-making (Ozga, 2008; Williamson, 2017; Landri, 2018; Grek, Maroy & Verger, 2021; Williamson, 2017, 2021; among many others), deepening and supporting the phenomenon of datafication (Williamson, 2017). Although the collection of data on education is nothing new, the importance of these changing digital policy processes shows that there is a digital layer added to what has already been taking shape in the governance of education. This layer includes its own actors, worlds, instruments, types of knowledge, possibilities for action.

Educational policy in the European space is nowadays entirely embedded in a digital environment of commensuration, where “good” outcomes are compared, visualized, and desired (Landri, 2018). This European digital environment is constituted by many instruments, some of European scope, but most working at national and local level, collecting, sorting and distributing data, often for later use by European aggregating platforms, such as the Education and Training Monitor. Educational policy research needs to study the digital instruments that make all this possible, it is important to understand the ideas they carry and the imaginaries surrounding them, as well as to follow the trail of their construction and the actors involved in their doings.

To understand how digital technologies are intertwined with educational policy we must distance ourselves from the above-mentioned deterministic thinking, but also observe and analyse those very ideas in the education sector. What are the imaginaries on technology that surround digital educational governance? How can we describe these imaginaries more concretely, where and by whom are they produced and reproduced? What ideas are shared among different actors and which are not, and how do these relate to practice?

This study analyses 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. It serves at the same time local school pupil management and the administration of the education system. It is a real-time national web platform where an individual file is kept for each student from the time of entrance in the education system. It’s the software teachers access as they start each class to enter attendance data and lesson summaries, where student enrolment is carried out nation-wide, ministry staff check individual or aggregated data. It has some innovative features, like cross sector non-human automatic processes for information checking with social security, health or law services, for example.

Studied as a public policy instrument, E360 is analysed as an instrument loaded with meaning (Lascoumes & Le Galès, 2007), not as neutral device, a simple technical object, but rather as an artefact carrying ideas that deserve the researcher’s attention (Wajcman, 2015; Kitchin & Dodge, 2011; Beer, 2017). By describing these ideas, the purpose of this study is to understand the discursive construction surrounding E360, as a means to discuss the imaginaries on technology that surround digital education governance both nationally and in the European education space.  

The approach and procedures of this study are inspired by the proposals of the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse analysis (SKAD) (Keller, 2007, 2013), which offers a view of discursive manifestations that is in line with the political sociology perspective (Lascoumes & Le Galès, 2007) that frames this study. Keller (2007) sees discourse as “a regular relationship between a specific set of enunciation practices and materialities and a semantic content that proposes a certain symbolic structuring of the world” (p.297). Thus, SKAD combines and moves away from, on the one hand, the Foucauldian approach that analyses discourses as emergent and abstract structures and doesn’t really take into account the actions of social actors and, on the other hand, the excessive importance that Berger and Luckmann attributed to the “banal and everyday knowledge of ordinary people” (p.296). A discourse does not exist independently of its manifestations, nor are discursive practices proof that discourse as an abstract structure exists. They are the realisations of a construction that can only exist in the making. This importance attributed to actors, without losing the notion of a “specific structuring of linguistic acts dispersed in time and space” (Keller, 2007, p.296) that frames their actions, is particularly interesting in the study of educational public policies from the perspective of public action, for which actors are one of the fundamental elements and therefore deserve the attention of the researcher. That said, we must keep in mind that actors are but one of the fundamental elements, deeply interconnected with others. And this web – also discursive – frames, enables and constrains their actions, deserving attention itself for all those reasons. To gather data I observed team meetings, collected policy documents which frame the key digital reform moments in Portugal 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. In line with SKAD, I conducted an immersive and inductive content analysis to all the material.

Through the study of the discursive construction around E360, we get a glimpse of the imaginaries on digital education governance in Portugal. I will present these by showing how information technologies are pictured as a solution to a problem – a distance between what there is and what there ought to be. This solution is framed in a generic deterministic thinking which imagines optimistic impacts of digital technology upon society and education. A techno-solutionism that envisions a new and inevitable well-ordered administration of education in Portugal. I first describe this imagined solution in more general terms, that is, how it reveals the place and the role of information technologies in public administration, its relation with the administered and how these subjects are portrayed. Secondly, I describe the imagined solution for the administration of education, focused on how E360 is depicted, what its characteristics promise for the administration of education at pupil, school and system level. All along it will become clear how digital education governance is described by all actors as the construction of a better, well-ordered world through information technologies. And how the design and development of E360 is inscribed in that same fabrication of a better and well-ordered administration of education in Portugal. This Promethean vision will then be confronted with a less reassuring experience when actors actually design, develop or use the dispositive. Tensions and contradictions arise, chaos shows up every now and then, choices are made for different kinds of reasons. Maybe order will not be so well-ordered. These results allow us to discuss how digital education governance is taking shape nationally through E360 and also to get some insight on the imaginaries on technology and their relations to practice within digital educational policy-making in the broader European context.

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