Assessment technologies in schools: ‘deliverology’ and the ‘play of dominations’

Ball, Stephen J.; Maguire, Meg; Braun, Annette; Perryman, Jane; Hoskins, Kathryn

doi:10.1080/02671522.2010.550012

Cited by 75 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Specifically, the early years has become increasingly drawn into the school 'delivery chain' (Ball et al 2012, Moss 2014) partly enabled by the increased circulation and flow of digital data through which teachers measure performance between the input of the nursery to the end of primary school and, recently, explicitly through to exams at age 16.…”

Section: The Impact On Teachers Teaching and Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

The datafication of early years education and its impact upon pedagogy

Roberts-Holmes¹,

Bradbury²

2016

Improving Schools

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This paper raises important questions about whether the increasing control of early years education through performance data is genuinely a means for school improvement. This composite article, based upon the previously published work of Roberts-Holmes (2015) and Roberts-Holmes and Bradbury (2016), examines the pervasiveness of attainment data in early years education professional activity, its impact on early years teachers' consciousness and identity, and the narrowing and instrumentalisation of early years pedagogy. The authors argue that, rather than improving quality, the current obsession with performance data and its stretch down the age range has the potential to undermine the foundations for children's personal development and learning. The article also points to the ways in which a triage effect (Gillborn and Youdell, 2000) has led to the neglect of some children in order to push targeted children over specific performativity hurdles. The discussion applies Foucault to the early education sector in England, and builds upon other early childhood researchers such as Moss (2014).

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Section: The Impact On Teachers Teaching and Childrenmentioning

confidence: 99%

The datafication of early years education and its impact upon pedagogy

Roberts-Holmes¹,

Bradbury²

2016

Improving Schools

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“…Increased levels of school autonomy and responsibility (as a prerequisite for successful entrepreneurial self-management) along with the diminished role of the state in running the internal affairs of the school are becoming a specific tool, drawing the public sector into entrepreneurial behaviour; at the same time, however, the role of the state paradoxically is being strengthened through the setting of standards and controls in education through across-the-board testing. The use of standardised testing to measure quality is gradually becoming part of the legislation on education, as is the case for example in the USA with the adoption of the No Child Left Behind policy as Suspitzyna (2010) has demonstrated or as in the Education White Paper of 2005 in England as described by Ball et al (2011). Both cases clearly indicate that continual testing of pupil performance is becoming the focal point of the legislation that is being implemented.…”

Section: School Culture In Managerial Strategies For Social Changementioning

confidence: 97%

“…Research by Ball et al (2011) has pointed to the fact that within the field in which it operates, the phenomenon of standards, as an expression of the "audit culture", has the ability to arrange and rearrange, shape and reshape anything and to attribute position and identity to anyone. Their study (undertaken in the context of England) on the principles of deliverology and the mechanism of the delivery chain shows how the audit culture, where standards play a central role, has permeated down from the macro-level of administration down to the micro-world of schools and classrooms.…”

Section: School Culture In Managerial Strategies For Social Changementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Their study (undertaken in the context of England) on the principles of deliverology and the mechanism of the delivery chain shows how the audit culture, where standards play a central role, has permeated down from the macro-level of administration down to the micro-world of schools and classrooms. Ball et al (2011) demonstrate how a new metanarrative is emerging on schooling to achieve standards and how the phenomenon of standards and controls have become the main filter through which all objects and subjects found in the educational and school environments are perceived. "That is, teachers, pupils and schools and pedagogies, procedures, performance, data and initiatives all of these objects and subjects are to be 'focused' on raising standards (Ball et al 2011, 5).…”

Section: School Culture In Managerial Strategies For Social Changementioning

confidence: 99%

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School culture at risk of political and methodological expropriation

et al. 2012

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The aim of this article is to problematize the concept of school culture both as a concept and as a subject of investigation. It deals with the historical roots of this concept and the fact that it is shrinkinga consequence of the managerial imperatives of effectiveness and accountability in education. School culture, in relation to the quality of schools and the quality of education, has become the subject of audits, arrived at through a developed network of standardisation in education, testing and evaluation. The methodology of evaluation currently lending particular substance to school culture, however, generates different methodological perspectives on investigating school culture and thus research is becoming an instrument of political power. In the research it is then necessary to either abandon the concept of school culture or to free it from spinning round the cycle of evaluation/self-evaluation-a change in school culture-improving the "quality of the school"-a new evaluation/self-evaluation. One way to do this is to employ ethnographic approaches in research into schools and to understand school culture as a system of texts.

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“…If poor performance continues, the school may be closed (Perryman, 2006, p. 149). These pressures of performativity, under such a high-stakes regime, lead, inevitably, to teachers teaching to the test; avoiding innovative and challenging teaching strategies and deploying reductive, low-risk subject knowledge and technical assessment approaches (Ball, 2003;Ball, Maguire, Braun, & Perryman, 2011;Lingard, Martino, & Rezai-Rashi, 2013). This contemporary imperative, of time-consuming emphasis on assessment results and compliance with official school knowledge in school texts and examination board specifications, deflects teachers' (and possibly policy-makers') attention from identifying and challenging colonial discourses that lie within the texts with which they engage.…”

Section: Contextsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disrupting colonial discourses in the geography curriculum during the introduction of British Values policy in schools

Winter

2018

Journal of Curriculum Studies

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The main purpose of this article is to expose and disrupt discourses dominating global development in an English school geography textbook chapter. The study was prompted by a teacher's encounter with cultural difference in a geography lesson in South Korea. I investigate the issues raised through the lens of a new curriculum policy in English schools called 'Promoting Fundamental British Values' which forms part of England's education-securitisation agenda, a topic of international attention. Following contextualization across research fields and in recent curriculum and assessment policy reform, I bring together theoretical perspectives from curriculum studies and Continental philosophy that do not usually speak to each other, to construct a new analytical approach. I identify three key themes, each informed by colonial logic: 'development' , 'numerical indicators' and 'learning to divide the world' . The inquiry appears to expose a tension between the knowledge of the textbook chapter and the purported aims of the British Values curriculum policy, but further investigation reveals the two to be connected through common colonial values. The findings are relevant to teachers, publishers, textbook authors, policy-makers and curriculum researchers. I recommend a refreshed curriculum agenda with the politics of knowledge and ethical global relations at its centre.

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Assessment technologies in schools: ‘deliverology’ and the ‘play of dominations’

Cited by 75 publications

References 9 publications

The datafication of early years education and its impact upon pedagogy

The datafication of early years education and its impact upon pedagogy

School culture at risk of political and methodological expropriation

Disrupting colonial discourses in the geography curriculum during the introduction of British Values policy in schools

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