Data shapes school
Schools have become the site of extraordinary levels of monitoring and data recording, much of it in the name of ‘quality’. This recording is far from neutral, instead shaping everything about children’s education and pushing out aspects that cannot be quantified and measured.
The introduction of the centralised and standardised curriculum in 1988 marked a significant shift. The move has been away from education as something localised, which could be shaped for the needs of children and local communities, to the current reality where the majority of what children will learn and do has been decided by government – sometimes by individual ministers. Assessment and testing is used to ensure quality control.
The system has become one which is machine like with the demands of data pushing education away from children’s rights to play, to freedom of expression and to a meaningful say in their education.
AI threatens to reinforce and accelerate these existing problems.
“The purpose of education becomes the creation of data-dopplegangers, or data-doubles of the children. Through continued assessment against norms, another version of the child is created, a data-doppelganger which is then used to judge not only the child, but also the teacher and the school”
“…settings in schools and nurseries are subject to the demands of data…”
“England’s very heavy emphasis on statutory assessment for accountability has not been fit for the essential purpose of supporting children’s learning.”
Professors Dominic Wyse and Alice Bradbury,Dr Yana Manyukhina and Emily Ranken
HHCP Briefing Paper The Future of Primary Education in England – In the Hands of a New Government (2024)
“The purpose of education becomes the creation of data-dopplegangers, or data-doubles of the children. Through continued assessment against norms, another version of the child is created, a data-doppelganger which is then used to judge not only the child, but also the teacher and the school”
AI in education
In education – as with all other fields – AI is being sold as the answer to all our woes. However, it involves a further significant shift of education to the private sector as well as increased negative impacts on children’s learning and privacy.
“…the significant risk that AI amplifies further standardization. Standardization, of course, seeks to make contexts irrelevant – the idea is the standard model can work everywhere. This again isn’t a new trend in education, but the issue is AI reinforcing it through the reproduction of highly standardized formats of teaching and learning.”
Dr Ben Williamson
code acts in education: Critical keywords of AI in education (2024)
“…education is vulnerable to capture by AI because it has already been made machinic. Neoliberalism has shaped education to be standardised, optimised and scalable, a trajectory that exactly matches the values encoded in machine learning.”
Dr Dan McQuillan
Deschooling AI (to be published 2025)
“This year, we can now be certain that we will begin to see the adoption of deeply embedded AI tools which fundamentally change teaching.”
Lucien Bowater CEO Olex AI
Schools Week: How Labour’s AI datastore will transform workload and wellbeing (2024)
“… the risks of automated austerity schooling — eroding pedogagic autonomy, garbling information, privacy and data protection threats, enhancing classroom surveillance, and far more — remain significant and underaddressed.”
Dr Ben Williamson
code acts in education: Automated austerity schooling (2024)
Rights v standardisation
Rights respecting education has children’s voice, participation and agency at the heart of it, as well as input and relevance to families and communities. Play too should be critical part of education. Centralisation and quality assurance – enforced via OFSTED – aim to make sure children receive a good education but the practices of government setting curriculum, as well as then measuring and recording so as to assess children, teachers and schools, has crowded out respect for children’s rights.
We barely question the need to record everything that children do, yet there is clear evidence of harm, and there are other countries that do so in a much more moderate way.
Centralised curriculum
“Before 1988 there was no statutory state control of the primary curriculum, nor was there a national system of statutory testing. Schools and teachers were able to implement a curriculum which they felt met the needs of the pupils they taught…”
…there also began to emerge a dissatisfaction among government ministers [in the 70s] that schools were too free to do as they please, with little apparent accountability. Some were critical in particular of the supposedly too unstructured ‘child-centred approach’”
Professors Dominic Wyse and Harry Torrance
Educational Research: The development and consequences of national curriculum assessment for primary education in England (2009)
“The vital concept of curriculum relevance, for pupils and teachers alike, arguably was lost in the enthusiasm for breadth and balance through national conformity.”
Professors Dominic Wyse and Harry Torrance
Educational Research: The development and consequences of national curriculum assessment for primary education in England (2009)
“Curriculum represents one of the critical contextual factors affecting both whether children have a sense of agency and whether they can exercise agency. Curriculum is a domain in which affordances for agency are created – or not.”
Dr Yana Manyukhina and Professor Dominic Wyse
BERA: Children’s agency: What is it, and what should be done? (2021)
“…we advocate a skills-based curriculum. One that is focused on communication, physical, interpersonal and interpersonal skills and thinking and learning skills….such a curriculum would of course develop skills through content, but the subject content of this curriculum, and its organisation, would not be designed by civil servants in Whitehall. It would be designed by teachers, working locally in their communities, to engage the interests and develop the abilities of their pupils.”
ATL – The Education Union
Subject to Change: New Thinking on the Curriculum. (2007)
Impact on agency
With the curriculum set by central government – with even individual ministers having had huge sway over what children have to learn – there is limited ability for children, parents or community to have input into what they learn. The curriculum in place leaves little room for children’s agency, which is contrary to human rights principles.
“There should be respect for the agency of children and young people, who should be recognized as active contributors to their own learning, rather than passive recipients of education.”
“Agency is closely connected to other desirable aspects related to children and childhood including children’s rights and the need to listen to and respect the voice of the child”
Professors Dominic Wyse and Alice Bradbury,Dr Yana Manyukhina and Emily Ranken
HHCP Briefing Paper The Future of Primary Education in England – In the Hands of a New Government (2024)
“The reasons for the lack of children’s and teachers’ agency in primary education in England are multiple. One of the major contributors has been the unprecedented levels of control that government has assumed over education through the Department for Education’s (DfE) policies on curriculum, assessment and increasingly pedagogy.”
Professors Dominic Wyse and Alice Bradbury,Dr Yana Manyukhina and Emily Ranken
HHCP Briefing Paper The Future of Primary Education in England – In the Hands of a New Government (2024)
“The child’s right to autonomy of thought, conscience, religion and expressing themselves, must be also be reflected in the curriculum if parity-of-participation is to be ensured.”
Professor Eleanore Hargreaves, Drs Denise Buchanan and Laura Quick
Journal of Curriculum Studies: National Curriculum and Assessment in England and the continuing narrowed experiences of lower-attainers in primary schools (2023)
“Many students feel that their true personality is stripped from them by the current education system, which repeatedly emphasises and promotes the idea that individuals can only be successful in life by attaining high grades. This narrow conception of success is a deeply entrenched issue causing the education system to neglect our unique traits, values and ambitions.”
Julia, Afruza, Fatima, Sadia, Reya, Maheen, and Iqra
States of Mind: “We’re not learning, we’re memorising”: Read London students’ powerful open letter (2019)
“The idea that children should be enjoying the learning process has limited presence in the NCE.”
“Agency, creativity and autonomy are limited as the teacher becomes part of the collective consciousness of the data-generating machine.”
“The lack of attention to children’s agency results not only in a failure to provide children with opportunities to exercise agency but also in a failure to support the development of their agentic capacity in the first place.”
Play should be a fundamental part of all children’s education. The drive for data pushes education towards more formal activities and away from play and creativity.
Not only are the formal activities ones which increasing numbers of children struggle with – driving up numbers of children identified as having special educational needs or disabilities – but children are being denied their fundamental right to play. What the school day includes, or excludes, matters to all children as they spend so much of their lives in school. For children living in difficult home environments the loss is even greater.
“…inclusive education and inclusive play are mutually reinforcing and should be facilitated during the course of every day throughout early childhood education and care (preschool) as well as primary and secondary school. While relevant and necessary for children of all ages, play is particularly significant in the early years of schooling. Research has shown that play is an important means through which children learn.”
“play itself is non-compulsory, driven by intrinsic motivation undertaken for its own sake, rather than as a means to an end…The key characteristics of play are fun, uncertainty, challenge,flexibility and non-productivity.”
“…the data-doppelganger limits play, as it does not produce the data needed. Play is an activity which has multiple outcomes and cannot easily be measured and controlled.”
rights report on uk
“Integrate children’s right to play into school curricula and ensure that children have sufficient time to engage in play and recreational activities that are inclusive and age-appropriate”
Committee on the Rights of the Child
Concluding observations on the combined sixth and seventh reports of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (2023)
“… the process of datafication in early childhood education facilitates and accelerates the increasing formalisation of learning with young children, while simultaneously the greater use of formal assessments and set subjects produces yet more data. Datafication and schoolification are two sides of one coin.”
Professor Alice Bradbury
Datafied at four (2018)
“The primacy of completing the curriculum for mathematics and English, and then being assessed in it, seems to have justified deliberate exclusion of these children from break or playtime, despite their prime importance as sites for building and enjoying relationships.”
Children’s health and happiness
The increased monitoring – along with the more formal education at earlier ages and reduced play – has gone hand in hand with increased stress experienced by children.
“78% of young people said that school had made their mental health worse.”
“After the introduction of the National Curriculum Tests in England, low achieving pupils had lower self-esteem than higher-achieving pupils, whilst beforehand there was no correlation between self-esteem and achievement.”
Professors Dominic Wyse and Harry Torrance
Educational Research: The development and consequences of national curriculum assessment for primary education in England (2011)
“the simple question of ‘can you identify this letter?’ communicates the message that the child should be able to identify the letters of the alphabet. This reveals to the child the unknown unknowns as they were previously unaware that they did not know any letters.”
“Exclusion and the feelings of being devalued was perhaps exacerbated by the competitive climate of the classroom… Learning as a social activity, that was worthwhile and enjoyable in its own right, did not seem to be emphasised in this schooling system.”
Professor Eleanore Hargreaves, Drs Denise Buchanan and Laura Quick
“Look at them! They all have friends and not me”: the role of peer relationships in schooling from the perspective of primary children designated as “lower-attaining” (2021)
“The children described instances of feeling troubled by their relationships; and their “low-attainment” status appeared to be linked to some, if not many, of their troubles.”
Professor Eleanore Hargreaves, Drs Denise Buchanan and Laura Quick
“Look at them! They all have friends and not me”: the role of peer relationships in schooling from the perspective of primary children designated as “lower-attaining” (2021)