The datafication of early years education and its impact upon pedagogy

Roberts-Holmes, Guy; Bradbury, Alice

doi:10.1177/1365480216651519

Cited by 40 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 22 publications

(44 reference statements)

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“…What Lingard et al (2013) terms ‘datafication’, governing through numerical data, is increasingly apparent (Roberts-Holmes, 2014), made more potent when linked to the introduction, since 2013, of performance-related pay for teachers. Large-scale, national evaluative studies, positivistic in character, have been funded to add yet further oversight and to provide evidence on most effective technologies – ‘what works’.…”

Section: Discourses Of Control In Early Childhood Education: the Casementioning

confidence: 99%

There are alternatives! Contestation and hope in early childhood education

Moss¹

2015

Global Studies of Childhood

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In a context of expanding early childhood education, this article begins by adopting a critical approach, exploring the technologies being applied to young children in a contemporary society of control, taking the case of England, a country which has seen a marked change in government's attitude towards early childhood education over the past 20 years, from indifference to high priority. England also illustrates the relationship between changing state attitudes to early childhood education and the growing influence of neoliberalism on politics and economics. The second part of the article changes tack, from a critique of a powerful discourse of control to the disruptive potential of a discourse of hope. While recognising that 'everything is dangerous', not least education and the institution of the school, and that the dangers should never be downplayed, there are alternatives, for example, a discourse of education and the school that foregrounds democracy, emancipation and potentiality, a discourse that many have sought to enact and continue to do so.

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Section: Discourses Of Control In Early Childhood Education: the Casementioning

confidence: 99%

There are alternatives! Contestation and hope in early childhood education

Moss¹

2015

Global Studies of Childhood

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“…Ball et al 2012 ; Ozga 2009 ). This focus on testing and performance is generally at odds with primary school cultures in England which have traditionally emphasised play, pastoral care and creative expression (Roberts-Holmes and Bradbury 2016 ). Working at a counterpoint to these policy and pedagogical tensions are material threats to schools, with the possibility of government intervention and new management impositions if they do not meet benchmark standards, with SATs data being one of the indicators Ofsted 1 use to rate the ‘quality’ of schools during inspection visits.…”

Section: Testing Pressure and Standardised Language Benchmarks In Enmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grammar tests, de facto policy and pedagogical coercion in England’s primary schools

Cushing

2020

Lang Policy

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Since their introduction by the Conservative government in 2013, primary school children in England have taken a mandated grammar, punctuation and spelling assessment, which places an emphasis on decontextualised, standardised English and the identification of traditional grammatical terminology. Despite some concise criticisms from educational linguists, there remains no detailed and critical investigation into the nature of the tests, their effects on test takers, and the policy initiatives which led up to their implementation. This article contributes to this gap in knowledge, using critical language testing as a methodological framework, and drawing on a bricolage of data sources such as political speeches, policy documents, test questions and interviews with teachers. I discuss how the tests work as de facto language policy, implemented as one arm of the government’s ‘core-knowledge’ educational agenda, underpinned by a reductive conceptualisation of language and a problematic discourse of ‘right/wrong’ ways of speaking. I reveal how teachers talk about the ‘power’ of the tests, intimidating and coercing them into pedagogies they do not necessarily believe in or value, which ultimately position them as vehicles for the government’s conservative and prescriptive language ideologies.

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“…The broad phases of development described in this document outlined expected developmental norms for an age-related phase, such as 30–50 months. Broad phases of learning were found by the creators of many online tracking systems to lack the level of detail required to track the minutiae of child progress over time, so each broad phase was broken down into smaller steps to fabricate a more specific norm (Roberts-Holmes and Bradbury, 2016).…”

Section: Policy Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, the child is reconstituted in data. The data other, which has been created for each child in the form of this corpus of data, is scrutinised, compared and polished to create the ideal version of the child needed for accountability purposes (Roberts-Holmes and Bradbury, 2016). Hierarchisation is crucial as it identifies those who may possibly reach the GLD.…”

Section: Normalising Judgementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructing deficit data doppelgängers: The impact of datafication on children with English as an additional language

Pierlejewski

2019

Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood

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In this article, an evaluation of the English early childhood education context reveals children constructed as data. The complex, chaotic and unpredictable nature of the child is reconstituted in numerical form – a form which can be measured, compared and manipulated. Children are reconceptualised as data doppelgängers, ghostly apparitions which emulate the actual embodied child. The focus of early childhood education and care thus moves from child-centred to data-centred education. The author specifically focuses on the impact of this aspect of the performative regime on children who have English as an additional language – an under-researched area in the field. Foucault’s work on governmentality is used as a theoretical lens through which to understand the process of datafication. The author uses a composite child, generated from a number of children from her experience as a teacher, as a starting point for discussion. This reveals children as disadvantaged, as their home languages are no longer used to assess communication skills. Their data doppelgängers are not useful to the teacher as they are unable to demonstrate a Good Level of Development – a key measure of school readiness in English policy. The author argues that in post-Brexit-vote Britain, subtle changes to early childhood education increase disadvantage, promoting white, British culture and thus marginalising those from other cultures.

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The datafication of early years education and its impact upon pedagogy

Cited by 40 publications

References 22 publications

There are alternatives! Contestation and hope in early childhood education

There are alternatives! Contestation and hope in early childhood education

Grammar tests, de facto policy and pedagogical coercion in England’s primary schools

Constructing deficit data doppelgängers: The impact of datafication on children with English as an additional language

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