"Data-day teaching": early years practitioners' experiences of datafication in primary schools

<p dir="ltr">This project attends to the stories that five Early Years Foundation Stage teachers in England choose to tell about data, describing in detail their experiences working in increasingly datacentric contexts. Using a narrative approach participants tell their stories across time, spanning careers within a single school, multiple schools and in relation to their own experiences of schooling. The project explores how these teachers negotiate the data-infrastructure within their settings highlighting the pleasures and dangers of data work It examines the experiences of reception class practitioners like Carrie, Alex and Fran who work in enterprising ways with their class-based, cohort and wider school data and Robyn and Grace, nursery practitioners, who describe less-quantifiable aspects of their EYFS practice.</p><p dir="ltr">Individual stories are located within a wider policy story beginning with the Desirable Learning Outcomes (SCAA, 1996). Whilst overall the policy story sets out the wholesale expansion of data-based practices, recent policy texts reflect a growing anxiety driven by concerns around performance data and the impact of performative tasks on teacher workload and retention. The recent problematisation of data has seen the development of a freedom-from-data narrative, particularly with regard to the inspectorate, suggesting Ofsted are less interested in data. These five participants remain highly sceptical, when in practice they continue to experience an expansion of scripted lessons, intervention programmes and the growing involvement of commercial actors and new technologies designed to secure data-based outcomes in the EYFS.</p><p dir="ltr">The project develops existing knowledge, contributing to an understanding of post-performative teacher identities and of being enterprising. It provides insights into how EYFS practitioners become responsibilised, embrace, and evade working entrepreneurially with their data, against a background of existing research that explores entrepreneurialism often from the perspective of school leaders, rather than class-based practitioners or those within the Early Years. The final chapter suggests how thinking with these particular stories can be used to develop the idea of data-hierarchy : a tool to understand the emergence of current and future data-based relationships within primary schools.</p>