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Internationally, assessment and the use of diagnostic data are recognized as critical capabilities for teachers. This is not a recent development, with assessment recognized for some decades as playing a significant role in informing learning and learners.This paper will examine whether teachers and members of the school leadership team utilize the National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) data for informing teaching and improving learning. Using a theoretical framework that draws on the conceptualisation of assessment as a social practice and Wenger’s social theory of learning as a shared enterprise in a community of practice, this paper will provide evidence of the common power relationships (school leaders and teachers) that exist as part of social structures within a community of practice. The paper will present how these power relationships impede access to, use of or enable expertise in the analysis of NAPLAN data.The findings are based on an empirical study of nine case study schools across two Australian states and suggest there are inequalities of access to NAPLAN data between school leaders and teachers. The study discovered variegated access and distinct pathways of data dissemination and analysis dependent on a teacher’s specified role within the school. The paper concludes with suggestions for greater stewardship from school leaders in building school cultures of data literacy and highlights the importance of collaboration between school leaders and teachers to build professional capability in this area.

In December 1624, the London draper and merchant adventurer, John Kendrick (Fig. 1), died leaving a large proportion of his considerable fortune to charitable causes. Like other early seventeenth-century metropolitan benefactors, he sought to attack the causes of poverty as well as to relieve its impact, and his legacies included the sums of £7,500 and £4,000, bequeathed respectively to the Berkshire towns of Reading and Newbury, to establish workhouses for the employment of the poor. Workhouses were a relatively new public institution at this date. In the wake of the dissolution of both monasteries and religious guilds in the 1530s and 1540s, and consequent decline in charitable support to the poor, urban authorities experimented with a range of measures to relieve poverty. A small number of towns and cities, including York (1567) and Chester (1577), used charitable funds and locally raised poor rates to establish workhouses to provide work and training to the poor. The workhouses were not residential and in some cases merely acted as distribution points for raw materials to be processed at home. In a parallel development, other towns and cities, including London (1555) and Ipswich (1569) established houses of correction to punish vagrants and to force them to work. Some also provided training schools for the young. The state moved quickly to endorse such measures. Legislation was introduced in 1576 requiring justices of the peace to supply stocks of wool, hemp, flax, iron or other materials to provide work for the poor and to establish houses of correction in each county for incorrigible rogues and those who refused to work. Penalties for non-compliance with the legislation were introduced in 1610.

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