Governing through time(s): temporal modes of governance in digital education policy

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a renewed focus on temporality in education policy and governance. This article aims to contribute to this growing body of literature by examining a recent digital education policy initiative in Flanders (Belgium) called ‘Digisprong’. Arguing that time, in relation to space, in education policy is relationally produced rather than existing ‘out there’, the article advances a relational interpretation of the concept of ‘temporal governance’. Encompassing the different ways time governs education, this offers a heuristic to empirically study temporalities in education policy. The analysis illustrates how Digisprong shapes three temporal modes of governance: futurization by flattening the past, acceleration through recalibration, and creating conditions for timeliness. Conclusively, we contend that when examining educational time(s), it becomes evident that different temporalities of education governance are not isolated. Instead, they are intricately enacted simultaneously and differentially, highlighting the need for empirical research on time in education.

Keywords:

• Temporal governance
• time
• digital education policy
• relational thinking

Introduction

Contemporary developments in education policy and governance are increasingly characterised as being no longer contained within the nation-state’s fixed and prefigured topographic boundaries (Gulson et al. 2017). As a range of research has shown, the control of education systems cannot be situated solely within the hands of national governments and their bureaucratic systems (Hartong et al. 2022; Ozga 2012). Instead, education policies are moving through a variety of policy networks that destabilise the taken-for-granted authority of the nation-state and problematise the fixed ‘spatiality’ of who or what governs education (Peck and Theodore 2015; Williamson et al. 2019). This increasing mobility of policy is caused by, amongst others, the growing influence of global policy networks (Savage et al. 2021) and the increasing existence of technologies, such as data infrastructures and platforms that presumably allow ‘frictionless’ sharing of data within and across countries (Hartong 2018; Ozga 2012). International actors (e.g. OECD) thus progressively affect local policy innovations, which are increasingly structured as fast and reactive practices based on the premise that global policy spaces offer tangible solutions for local education systems (Lewis and Hogan 2019).

Although such re-spatialisations of education governance have been at the forefront of education policy research for many years already (Grek et al. 2013; Lawn 2011), substantial efforts have been made over the past years to (re-)introduce the aspect of time (e.g. Lingard 2021; Thompson and Cook 2014). Recent attempts to explicitly include the temporal dimension(s) of education policy stress the ‘temporal work’ (Lingard 2021, 339) that policy does in relation to emerging spaces of education governance. This recent focus on the temporal aspects of policy incites an analytical gaze that moves beyond the assumption of time being an objective container external from any human or technological interference and acknowledges that time, just like space, is fundamentally relational—that is, time is brought into being rather than existing out there (Bennett and Burke 2018; Decuypere and Vanden Broeck 2020). As this emerging body of research stresses, education policy does not (only) happen within a chronological unfolding of time; rather, policy (equally) does time in various ways that govern education (Lingard and Thompson 2017). Empirical research that shows how time is done through policy, however, is evolving but remains rather limited, as the emerging field of temporal research of education policy at present is more theoretical (Decuypere and Vanden Broeck 2020; Lingard and Thompson 2017; Sheail 2018).

This study contributes to this existing scholarship on education policy by providing an empirical account of the production of time through policy in one specific context: The region of Flanders (Belgium) with its reactive COVID-19 digital education policy ‘Digisprong’. By providing a relational interpretation of ‘temporal governance’ as an overarching conceptual heuristic (Landahl 2020), we scrutinise the temporalisation of education governance. To do this, we first extend the argument of how time plays a role in governance and how it has been conceptualised in recent years. We argue for a relational interpretation of the concept of ‘temporal governance’ to integrate a multiplicity of modes of how time governs education. This complicates the still predominantly spatialised understanding of time in education literature (Lingard and Thompson 2017). After foregrounding our methods and the corresponding empirical work, our analysis illustrates how three temporal modes of governance emerge in the recent digital education policy of Flanders: futurization by flattening the past, acceleration through recalibration, and creating conditions for timeliness. Conclusively, we highlight the need for further empirical research on time in education policy.

Investing in time in education research

While time is often thought of as independently and chronologically progressing in foreseeable ways—transcending our human existence (Adam 2006)—it has increasingly been argued that such a taken-for-granted understanding of time as objective, chronological, and measurable, is limited insofar as it ignores that time is something relational and the result of sociomaterial ‘fabrications’ (Decuypere and Vanden Broeck 2020). Time is historically and culturally contingent, and structures our lives as much as we structure time itself (Adam 2006). Put differently, time is relationally produced, rather than being realised according to a particular pre-existing time frame (Lingard and Thompson 2017).

Time is thus always ‘done’ and partly becomes ossified through technologies that give particular shapes to time, which, vice versa, order social life itself in different ways (Adam 2006). For example, clock time does not indicate time as it neutrally exists, but already abstracts time from natural (e.g. seasonal) occurrences and administrates and spatialises time. It allows time to be cut into chunks and measured to account for, among others, working hours (Lingard and Thompson 2017). Such spatialisations and administrations of time are already particular ways of governing societies (cf. Thompson 1967), and can equally be found in the traditional ordering of school time through timetables (Ball et al. 1984).

This complex nature of time is conceptualised by Adam (2004) as timescapes, which denote particular features and relations that work together to produce temporal constellations or logics in society. One emblematic example of such a timescape is that of modernity and industrialisation, which unequivocally embraced the idea of a time of efficient linear progression to advance towards a better future (Adam 2004). With the upsurge of digital technologies, the dominance of this modernist timescape is being ruptured and supplemented by a conception of time that is characterised by immediacy, networks, uncertainty, and diffusion (cf. Serres 2015). As Kitchin (2023) argues, through digital technologies timescapes have been unfolding which appear vital in reconfiguring daily social life today and producing new forms of network time.

This complex fabrication of digital timescapes has increasingly been corroborated in the context of digital education. Alirezabeigi and colleagues (2022) have for example argued how the introduction of screens in classrooms shapes school time into students following ‘algorhythmic patterns’ (113) of accelerated task completion on digital devices, reconfiguring the traditional timetabling logic of schooling (cf. Ball et al. 1984). Webb and colleagues (2020) theorise that through the embedment of Learning Analytics (LA) in school platforms, students’ (delineated) future desires are anticipated and immediately acted upon in the present based on past behaviour. LA then presumably perpetually offers new futures through adapted learning environments in real-time and eradicate the potential waiting time of students for expert feedback, an attempt to ‘end the habitual boredom of schooling’ (Webb, Sellar, and Gulson 2020, 7). Hence, such predictive analytics serve to perpetually act upon and immediately optimise students’ present actions (Smithers 2023).

Regarding education policy, research on time shows how policy discourses of international policy actors are increasingly focusing on potential future risks and uncertainty to justify the development of future-ready skills of learners in the present (Means 2021). These anticipatory logics produce forms of education governance that draw from the past to design potential futures of education, as a way to govern the present (Robertson 2022). Such a non-linear production of time through policy can be seen in how certain policy texts fabricate a ‘potentializing time’ (646) that is characterised by utilising future prospects to stimulate opportunities one can leverage in the present (Decuypere and Simons 2020). Likewise, the upsurge of digital infrastructures from international organisations (e.g. OECD) enacts anticipatory governance logics based on datafied information from past performance, enabling predictive decision-making in the present, and coordinating future educational developments (Gulson, Sellar, and Webb 2022). Such digital infrastructures enact a particular ‘future present’ (45), where policy increasingly draws on datafied information from the past and where anticipated outcomes are utilised to rethink contemporary practice, conversely shaping the (im)possibility of certain futures to come into existence (cf. Kitchin 2023). This implies a dynamism inherent to time, where educational times are multiple and the correspondence between past, present, and future, is moving—instead of being fixed (Lingard and Thompson 2017).

What this emerging literature shows, is that there exists a multiplicity of (constantly to be enacted) times that govern education and that education is governed differently through different productions of time (Mangez and Vanden Broeck 2020). Of importance here is, as Sharma (2014) argues, that these interrelated times variously affect and are differently acted upon by different groups of people—an indication that social life consists of ‘chronographies of power’, where ‘senses of time and possibility are shaped by a differential economy’ (9). This can be conceptualized as temporality, which is not synonymous with time, but indicates that politics are played out in how differential understandings of time are ushered in and produced simultaneously (Sharma 2014). Utilising this approach lends itself to disentangling the unevenness of different times that are produced (Sheail 2018), while simultaneously addressing the temporal micropolitics that occurs in practice (Sharma 2014). In this sense, time relates to governance as much as governance happens through time.

Building upon this critical work, we advance a relational interpretation of the concept of ‘temporal governance’ (Landahl 2020) as an overarching heuristic to study the differential ways in which education governance and policy operate temporally.

Temporal modes of governance as a conceptual heuristic

As employed by Landahl (2020), temporal governance alludes to how (the production of) time(s) governs education. Engaging with a shift in the governance structure of international assessments, which have been commonly understood as shaping education through a logic of expanding national education systems spatially, Landahl argues that such assessments equally offer temporal mechanisms of governance. That is, they install a particular international calendar for national education systems (Landahl 2020). Temporal governance thus offers a conceptual lens to imagine how governance takes place through time, whereby on the one hand policy discursively and materially shapes temporalities in specific ways, and on the other hand (national) policy is shaped by particular (international) temporal mechanisms itself (cf. Lingard 2021).

The focus on the temporal governance of calendars offered by Landahl (2020), however, still falls within a predominantly spatialised understanding of time. Notwithstanding the importance of scrutinising large-scale temporal trends of calendars associated with global developments, we advance a relational understanding of temporal governance. This implies a focus on the intricate ways in which time, and the differential ways it affects educational actors (cf. Sharma 2014), shapes social life and governs education. A relational reading of temporal governance operates as a sensitivity to the multiplicity of temporalities governing education—temporal modes of governance—that come into being through policy. This relational interpretation draws on an understanding of temporalities as political and as governing differentially (cf. Sharma 2014).

One promising line of relational inquiry along these lines is that of social topology. Generally, topology analyses the relations between properties of spatiotemporal constellations and how these relations remain continuous when the constellation under consideration de-forms (Shields 2012). The topological lens pays attention to the discontinuity and dynamism of presumably prefixed ‘shapes’ while scrutinising how, through deformations, particular educational forms can nonetheless be distinguished (Thompson and Cook 2015). Studying temporalities topologically is to pay attention to ongoing flows, change, and flux of times being produced, while scrutinising how continuous temporal forms nonetheless emerge through discontinuity (Decuypere, Hartong, and van de Oudeweetering 2022).

As such, topology necessitates an empirical analysis of the (spatio-)temporal properties of governing constellations (Decuypere and Simons 2016). However, at present, topological approaches for studying temporalities remain largely theoretical (Decuypere, Hartong, and van de Oudeweetering 2022). In this article, we draw on these trends to enhance a general relational reading of temporal governance to empirically disentangle precisely what temporalities are being shaped and how this is being done. This relational lens offers a sensitivity for empirical research to identify a coexistence of different temporalities—i.e. a ‘polysemic understanding of time’ (Lewis 2018, 690)—that enact different modes of governance (Kitchin 2023). Relational temporal governance thus indicates the differential production of a multiplicity of temporalities at once, without limiting empirical inquiry to one potential mode of temporal governance. Hence, a relational reading allows to scrutinize how temporalities overlap, share similarities, or make each other possible (Sharma 2014). The orientation of this framework shifts the focus—as well as the analytical challenge—to disentangling how different temporalities are empirically made.

Studying temporalities of education policy: the case of Flanders

To research how time is made, the present study, as part of a broader ethnographic study,¹ investigates one recent digital education policy. This research takes place in Flanders, the political community in charge of organising Dutch-speaking education in Belgium, which implemented an unforeseen digitisation policy called ‘Digisprong’ in December 2020 (Flemish Government 2020). This case is of interest as enclosed in the Belgian constitution (1831) is a claim for freedom of education, which implies everyone can found a school with limited governmental requirements (Valcke and Standaert 2018). Belgium de jure has a liberal education system and any form of governance that directly interferes with core constituents of school education, such as pedagogy, is prohibited (Geerinck and Wouters 2018).

Notwithstanding this autonomy, for a long time, schools have been organised by and grouped under two levels of intermediary organisations. First, umbrella organisations unite schools with the same pedagogical-philosophical orientation. They alleviate some responsibilities from schools, such as designing curricula. Second, school groups, are overarching structures for schools within a particular geographic region to facilitate cooperation between schools (Valcke and Standaert 2018).

Considering this background, Digisprong is a unique case as a reactive policy designed to address issues made apparent by the pandemic, making it particularly intriguing to study its temporal dynamics. To gain insight into how Digisprong governs schools, we triangulated various data collection methods. First, we conducted an extensive web search to map actors involved in enacting Digisprong. Furthermore, Digisprong’s policy document, and related Flemish and European governmental policy documents, were read and analysed in terms of how they frame temporalities of school digitisation (European Commission 2020; Flemish Government 2019, 2020; Redecker and Punie 2017; Weyts 2019).

Second, we ethnographically studied four schools during the school year 2021–2022, each differing in their approach to digitisation and their available infrastructural, financial, and personnel resources. This resulted in interviewing all coordinators of the participating schools. By examining how Digisprong enforced temporalities of change in the schools, we obtained a preliminary understanding of Digisprong’s temporal modes of governance. Grounded on these school-based insights, we subsequently interviewed seven education policy actors from the following institutions: Teacher union, school group, umbrella organisation, Flemish Ministry of Education and Training, and the Flemish education council.² These interviews were inductively analysed by focusing on how Digisprong produces temporalities and the way actors are (differently) affected by them (cf. Sharma 2014).

Temporal modes of governance through Digisprong

Towards the end of December 2020, the Flemish Ministry of Education and Training published a vision note called ‘Digisprong—from backlog to frontrunner: ICT plan for a qualitative digital education in the implementation of the relaunch plan Flemish resilience’. Digisprong aims ‘to invest in one big digital leap for all schools, teachers and pupils’ (2) based on the idea that Flanders is increasingly becoming a knowledge economy and investments herein are crucial for the future (Flemish Government 2020).

The Ministry of Education and Training argued that the COVID-19 crisis showed inequalities between schools and between pupils regarding access to digital technology as well as insufficient digital competencies of teachers and pupils and that a large-scale investment should bridge this gap. Therefore, Digisprong entailed a one-off financial injection for school digitisation consisting of 375 million euros, which is around twelve times the amount of the normal Flemish annual budget for ICT in education. These are primarily funds from the European Union’s NextGenerationEU recovery plan. A large part of this needed to be used to expand the digital infrastructure of schools and most significantly Digisprong financed one digital device per pupil from the fifth year of primary school onwards until the end of secondary school. Next to this investment in what is called ‘a future-proof and secure ICT infrastructure’ (4), Digisprong equally unfolded in three other focal points: A strong ICT policy in schools; professionalisation for ICT competent teachers; and establishing a knowledge centre that services the education field (Flemish Government 2020).

The Flemish Government (2020) claimed that school digitisation cannot be understood as an end in itself and argued that this investment should increase the quality of education by investing in the development of 21st-century competencies for teachers and pupils. The desire to increase the quality of school education through digital technology was a second reason, next to the pandemic, for the implementation of Digisprong—that is, a belief that digital technology will increase education quality as it offers differentiation, personalisation, learning analytics, and so forth (Flemish Government 2020). This rhetoric is inspired by the revised European Digital Education Action Plan that argues for the importance of using digital technology to facilitate ‘personalised, flexible and student-centred learning’ (2) beyond traditional constraints of schools (European Commission 2020).

Whereas the aims for Digisprong’s reform were clear, the Flemish Government stipulated that school boards decide autonomously which type of ICT equipment to purchase, rent or lease according to their educational project (Flemish Government 2020). As such, it appears Digisprong operated with a presumably open character which was ‘purely and solely aimed at facilitating the preconditions for meaningful use of ICT at school’ without interfering in pedagogical matters (Interviewee Ministry of Education and Training). Notwithstanding Digisprong’s claim of solely providing preconditions for processes of school digitisation, we argue Digisprong governs through the production of three temporal modes of governance.

Futurization by flattening the past

Distilled primarily through its strategic aim, a key message of Digisprong is that ‘every disadvantage has its advantage […] we seize the corona crisis to change the future of education’ (Flemish Government 2020, 3). Digisprong draws on the idea of a better future, one that is increasingly digital to improve education quality, and proposes it is within reach of pandemic innovations. The fundamental backdrop of its development was to leverage the present condition for the future to improve education ‘through offering digital resources for […] personalised learning, distance education under certain conditions, insight into student progress through learning analytics…’ (Flemish Government 2020, 3). The present condition of Flemish education, referring to the COVID-19 lockdowns and associated innovations, was to be ‘seized’ in the formation of future pedagogical development. That is, Digisprong framed the future of education within the contours of what was occurring in the present, whose urgency innovations were to be leveraged. It is in that sense that Digisprong rendered very explicit that the future of education, a future that is increasingly digitised and oriented on personalised interaction with individual digital devices, is not to be waited for. Rather, this future of digitised schooling is precisely visible in the possibilities of the present. There is, consequently, a specific techno-centric focus that prescribes pedagogical development:

We see now everyone developing a pedagogical approach based on that device-per-pupil idea, while a lot of schools were never planning on doing that. It is not said with that many words in the [policy] document, but people feel this is the new norm they need to strive for. (Interviewee Teacher Union)

As an interviewee from the Flemish education council argues, ‘There is an unquestioned premise of the “device-per-pupil” innovation, which already predetermines possible developments’. In other words, there is a self-proclaimed necessity of (a restricted form of) present digitisation in Flemish education that fabricates future possibilities (cf. Decuypere and Simons 2020).

A temporal modality emerges of a future present where educational futures are imagined within the contours of the present, establishing and folding a desirable future within the present as a way to justify current actions (cf. Kitchin 2023; Opitz and Tellmann 2015). This focus was further enhanced as Digisprong equally flattens the past: ‘Digisprong presents a tabula rasa that neglects what was already there. There were already different policies, pioneers in developing digital strategies, but there are no connections [with those].’ (Interviewee Flemish Education Council). The educational present is ‘reset’, based on a justification of the future that discards more complex relations between past and present (cf. McLeod 2017). Digisprong advocated for commencing with a clean slate, where (personalised) digitisation emerges as a crucial solution for contemporary educational issues. Insofar as the future is folded into the present to limit the waiting time for potential futures-to-be, the past is flattened by ignoring the complexity of previous developments. This ‘hyper-present’ focus constitutes a tautology since it innovates the present through a future that essentially does not fall outside of the boundaries of the present, and education innovation is hence merely focused on extending the instant in which it takes place (Bonnet 2020).

Consequently, ‘schools have renounced pieces of their built-up digitisation policies, which is going to have a long-term impact. You get a different kind of education because of the focus on current innovations’ (Interviewee Teacher Union). Schools experienced the conflict this stimulated between their pedagogical motives and what is deemed as essential within these boundaries:

The policy came a bit at an inconvenient time for us. We already had a laptop project in our schools for seven years, including a policy and ideas for [digitisation], which was working fine for us. And suddenly there is that Digisprong that does completely the opposite. (ICT coordinator).

We hear in the Flemish education council that a lot of schools or teachers are mad since they have the feeling that what they had already developed, or what had organically grown or [what] was critically thought out, has been wiped out. (Interviewee Teacher Union)

In sum, in this first temporal mode of governance, a limited space of manoeuvring emerges for schools by establishing a particular temporal modality of non-linear past-present-future relations. A temporal loop is constructed by Digisprong, focused on present digital innovation that forecloses different education futures and flattens histories of innovation that were already underway in schools. Ultimately, the two temporalities of folding and flattening time enact a hyper-present mode of governance that discursively and materially limits schools’ digital-pedagogical development.

Acceleration through recalibration

A second temporal mode of governance stems from Digisprong being accompanied by the accelerated mobility of an expanding private market. Generally, in digitisation of education, there is always a partial dependency on private actors to develop technology, as state agencies often lack the capacity to develop technology sufficiently and competitively compared to the private sector (Selwyn 2018). Private companies have thus always been present in school digitisation, but the pandemic operated as a catalyst in their mobility as it accelerated their navigation toward schools (Williamson and Hogan 2020).

When Digisprong was implemented, with its concurrent large financial stimulation, schools, and school groups became ‘flooded with an enormous number of devices’ (Interviewee School group) and digital solutions for distance schooling. Although the Flemish Government (2020) clearly stated that schools had a substantial amount of time to buy digital devices, the sudden financial injection they received through Digisprong, and the market structure rapidly expanding since the pandemic, intensified the expansion of schools’ digital infrastructures. As indicated by multiple ICT coordinators who are largely responsible for making this possible, ‘schools were thrown into the deep’ as everything went ‘too fast’. In other words, private actors utilised this sudden disruption by ‘explosively jumping upon education’ (Interviewee Flemish education council).

While there emerged an accelerated mobility of market actors, Digisprong itself did not explicitly necessitate schools to follow this. This mobility, however, started to mimic a sense of urgency for schools that incentivised an acceleration of educational change beyond Digisprong’s initial motives. Exemplary of this simulated urgency is the way the Flemish company ‘Signpost’ operated. Calling themselves ‘the ICT partner of education’ (Signpost n.d.), Signpost offers integrative solutions for school digitisation. As indicated by an ICT coordinator:

I have been called two or three times by the people of Signpost, saying: ‘You still have a budget and this has to be spent, and a device you buy now is worth more than in the end’, and so on. Or: ‘If you wait, probably not all of them will be able to be delivered’.

Signpost nudged schools to utilise its services as soon as possible, which is part of what can be called a ‘generated form of urgency’ (Interviewee Teacher Union). The investment of Digisprong paved the way for Signpost to rapidly reach schools by densifying possibilities for innovation, which was not necessarily accounted for in the Digisprong policy initiative itself. As an interviewee of the Ministry of Education and Training states:

Because of course, you notice that if you pump 375 million euros into the educational field, the world changes. We are also being stalked. You notice that the market is being manipulated. A Signpost starts aggressively entering the market and blocking us.

The idea of a company ‘blocking’ the government in its policy processes implies that a private actor streamlines potential ways policy comes into being in schools. It denotes a process of externalised policy acceleration, where EdTech re-orients policy by targeting government practices yet to come, such as the rollout of infrastructural innovations. There was thus a growing potential by which EdTech actors interfered with government procedures through their increasing mobility. As a result of this dynamic, a pace of acceleration emerged which instilled a sense of urgency for educational change.

The temporality of acceleration corroborates with other findings on how pandemic policies shaped processes of school change (Cone et al. 2022; Taglietti, Landri, and Grimaldi 2021). However, following Sharma (2014), we argue that this acceleration is not an all-encompassing temporality and is not a homogeneous architecture of time shared amongst all actors. That is, schools themselves are not necessarily operating within an accelerated pace, they are rather urged to recalibrate to this pace by attempting to synchronise their operations to this accelerated architecture (Sharma 2014). Recalibration means that there is not one temporality of acceleration emerging in the field of education, affecting all actors equally, but that schools feel the need to synchronise to it, even though they are often unable to do so.

This is indicated by the way in which some schools, often those with limited personnel resources, hastily purchased large amounts of digital devices. Some schools, as phrased by an ICT coordinator, ‘dived in and said “yes, let’s choose for that”, but they are perhaps now already regretting that they bought Chromebooks instead of something that pedagogically makes more sense to them’. Furthermore, ‘the Chromebooks are here but they are not even used yet, and they probably will not be used for the following year, and they are just stored somewhere’ (ICT coordinator). This shows that in one way, schools synchronised to this pace of acceleration, but in another way, this did not deterministically translate into accelerated educational change on the level of schools.

This temporal recalibration, then, was not wholly constraining, as schools with greater resources refused to follow this pace. Instead of opting for rapidly accessible alternatives, these schools opted for a different pace of slowness as a form of resistance (cf. Andrejevic, Dencik, and Treré 2020)—which can be understood as purposeful temporal inertia (despite the urgency of recalibrating to an accelerated pace). This can be seen in how some schools slowly built up their digital infrastructure and avoided fast commercial solutions, or in the way that schools with sufficient infrastructural resources waited until the very deadline to buy hardware, at a time when most schools required fast purchases of accessible devices. For example, one school bypassed restrictive framework contracts made by intermediary organisations and tendered for contracts on a European level:

So, you publish [the tender] on a European level and it has to be published for minimally a month. It takes three days to get there. So, it’s actually five weeks from when you publish your tender. After those five weeks, you get a closing of the bids, then you can open the bids. Before, you have no idea whether anyone made a bid. So, the day before yesterday, I open the bids. And there were two. Then you have to evaluate the bids on various criteria and write a report about it. It’s about 16 pages of report you write then, all the stuff you need to evaluate. At the end of the evaluation process, you have someone who won. (ICT coordinator)

In this example, the school negated established framework contracts for ICT hardware, because those primarily offered Google Chromebooks and more expensive Microsoft alternatives, both having proprietary operating systems. Even though almost immediate access to digital devices for pupils was conditioned as a necessity, this school resisted such urgency by negotiating recalibration to an imposed accelerated temporality. This inertia indicates that some schools actively claimed a right to negate privatised acceleration, which shows how the public character of schooling is of explicit concern. As an employee of the Ministry of Education and Training states: ‘Too often schools are seen as passive consumers of EdTech’. It is precisely this that is at stake in some schools: not to become consumers of a fast market where one is no longer in control. What occurs here is the recalibration or inertia of schools vis-à-vis the imposition of an accelerated temporality of innovation.

Creating conditions for timeliness

A third mode of governance effectuated through Digisprong alludes to ways policy utilises and enacts, and is affected by, opportune times for intervention. The disruptive need for school innovation, which was stimulated by Digisprong and the associated acceleration of EdTech’s mobility, combined with the pandemic need for digital forms of schooling, necessitated technical interventions at a very specific moment in time. Of paramount importance for these digital education innovations were digital platforms (Williamson and Hogan 2020). Although platforms are not new technologies, Flanders’ most used digital platform in schools called ‘Smartschool’ has been around since 2003 (Smartschool n.d.), through Digisprong a shift took place in how the usefulness of certain crucial digital platforms was determined:

I started looking at learning platforms in a completely different way because of corona. Before, I looked at this software purely in terms of performance. What does this thing do? Is it good for education? Does it do what it promises to do? […] These are performance indicators. Because of corona, I learned that scalability is at least as important. And Smartschool unfortunately failed. You don’t have to be a fan of Smartschool, but it is a Flemish product, tailored to the Flemish structure and needs of Flemish schools, and a Google or Microsoft cannot match that. […] Smartschool is in terms of performance better. […] But, it wasn’t scalable when it really mattered. (Interviewee Ministry of Education and Training)

Where performance used to be a crucial determinant, it has increasingly become essential that platforms offer sufficient scalability. The notion of scalability can be defined as the possibility of a digital platform increasing the access to, and rate by which it delivers, its services (Kenney, Hermens, and Clarke 2004). In other words, scalability emerges primarily as a temporal construct: an indication of platforms’ punctuality or capacity to be on time when required to provide educational services.

This is where the local Flemish platform Smartschool allegedly ‘failed’ according to some respondents and where Big Tech platforms, offered by Google and Microsoft, prevailed insofar as they assured scalable infrastructuralisation:

When you suddenly massively have to go on a digital platform to learn, it appeared that Google could allow that, and Microsoft as well. I called all three [Google, Microsoft, Smartschool] of them the Wednesday before the lockdown. We were thinking that schools were closing the day after and that we needed to organise distance education. With Microsoft and Google, in a couple of days, we had tenants with them for all of education. They have a pipe and they just open the tap. Smartschool eventually did this, but they still needed to start the negotiations, they still had to start buying servers and that is just not scalable. […] Whether it is a Flemish product or a foreign product, it is now the same for me, it has to be a good product. And good not only in terms of performance but in terms of scalability. (Interviewee Ministry of Education and Training)

This is corroborated by a teacher union:

How many schools have switched to Google Classroom? I have understood this was stimulated by the fact that Smartschool was not scalable at the time or wasn’t prepared, that Google Classroom massively jumped in this gap, and that schools are still using it now.

The slow upscaling of Smartschool was an untimely, and thus undesirable, procedure.

This necessity of intervening at the right time not only came forward through the infrastructuralisation of scalable platforms but was furthermore enacted through considering framework contracts for digital devices within the limits of whether these devices would be on time and not whether they served the pedagogical needs of schools. Articulated by a school group addressing the doubt of choosing from the broad scope of possibilities, ‘the question [regarding framework contracts] was: Will the devices be on time?’. Although Digisprong itself did not prevent schools from opting for alternative digital solutions (Flemish Government 2020), in practice school choice was demarcated to providers who could deliver devices on time. Hence, schools’ long-term pedagogical needs were outpaced by the short-term necessity of having digital devices. This strongly limited the amount of evident providers schools could rely on, and again: ‘Signpost was at that moment in time the only one whose pockets were deep enough to build up stock’ (Interviewee School group).

It appears that within the pandemic urgency, the logics of scalability and availability became crucial determinants in accelerated school digitisation. This largely determined who or what was able to intervene. The interruption in schooling became characterised by the necessity for timely technical solutions, where different actors were disproportionately able to be either on time or rather lagging behind and experiencing being out of time (Sharma 2014). As school education becomes increasingly intertwined with infrastructures, platforms, and digital devices provided by private partners (Williamson et al. 2022), our analysis shows how this development is susceptible to technical-economic logics superseding pedagogical logics. More strongly, there is at present a reversal of the argument that forms the premise of sustainable school digitisation—where decisions for school innovations are grounded in long-term strategies. Instead of deciding upon what was able to intervene in schools based on the educational relevance for specific school needs, educational relevance was rather defined as that which could intervene at the right time.

This third temporal mode of governance shows a temporality grounded in the synchronic capacity of certain actors to be in time, and this by engaging with a particular interruption or event at the right time (cf. Smith 1969). It shows how an opportunistic temporality was brought into being which served particular actors better than others. As such, this third mode of governance ushers in a temporality of timeliness, meaning that this being-in-time denotes who or what is better able to play a substantial role in education governance (Alhadeff-Jones 2017).

Conclusion

The main objective of this research was to utilise Flanders’ recent digitisation policy as a case to empirically understand how (the production of) time(s) in education policy plays a role in governing school education. Our analysis shows how Digisprong gives shape to three distinct temporal modes of school governance: futurization by flattening the past, acceleration through recalibration, and creating conditions for timeliness. Although these modes of governance are separately presented, they collectively shape contemporary school innovation. On the one hand, our analysis shows how policies govern school education by producing particular sorts of time regarding digital innovation. On the other hand, it also becomes apparent that policies themselves are affected by temporal processes of digitisation, as the expansion of digital infrastructures similarly shapes particular ways in which policy comes into being. Policy thus both produces and is restricted by the enactment of a multiplicity of temporalities, that, in turn, differentially shape school development. For this reason, studies on time can make significant contributions in enhancing our understanding of how education policy differentially affects change in, and mitigates or exacerbates inequalities between, schools. This opens up possibilities to better understand our present and to productively think about our educational futures (cf. Lingard 2021).

Conceptually, utilising a relational sensitivity elucidates how temporalities are always brought into being and enacted through different actors in practices, giving rise to different modes of governance. In light of the imperative for empirical investigation, it becomes evident that temporalities coexist and that the production of time(s) is subject to negotiation. Consistent with prior research, we observe the context-specific advent of governance practices in education, including imaginative future-oriented approaches (Williamson and Komljenovic 2023) and forms of acceleration (Segerholm 2020). This context-specificity implies we locally observed temporal trends that are significantly shaped by global evolutions, hence limiting a more comparative and holistic understanding of temporal governance. Different modes of governance thus need to be similarly conceptualized to complicate our understanding. Nonetheless, our study shows that these temporalities are not isolated entities but are rather intricately intertwined. They furthermore lack a hegemonic status as they are differentially acted upon. While seemingly stable, temporal modes of governance thus exhibit malleability in their diverse enactments within schools. Therefore, a relational interpretation of temporal governance proves indispensable in further comprehending how governance, manifested through time, shapes and is negotiated through subtle and intangible temporal aspects, such as paces, (a)synchronicities, punctualities, and others (cf. Kitchin 2023).

Conclusively, we highlight two emerging issues that should play a part in future thinking about time in education policy research, respectively a methodological concern and a theoretical reflection. First, an empiricism of ‘temporality’ is both a subject of study as well as a methodological sensitivity to the potential inharmonious relationships between various education actors. That is, empirically tracing the ways governance takes place through time, urges to concretely present how temporalities come into being in different ways, rather than explaining that particular dominant temporal trends abstractly exist. Doing this potentially offers different diagnoses of contemporary society and education as for example irrevocably accelerating toward particular pejorative futures. Such an empiricism can offer tools to present what seems unpresentable and unthinkable for conceptual metanarratives (cf. Lyotard 1984)—that is, different scenarios of how dominant educational temporalities are actively and intricately resisted, acted upon, changed, opened up, negotiated, and so forth. It is thus crucial to continue empirically investigating how these temporalities play out differently in other schools and how they are variously endured by educational actors (cf. Sharma 2014). This approach can tease out the peculiarities of policies and temporalities under investigation. Second, although education policy has always governed through time, it is increasingly becoming apparent that this governance through time is shifting to different modes. In line with contemporary analyses of (network) time (cf. Serres 2015), emergent modes of temporal educational governance are potentially evolving towards more instantaneity and temporal density (cf. Kitchin 2023). While the three temporal modes of governance identified here propose malleability and context-specificity, they are indicative of broader emergent temporal forms. As such, research needs to further disentangle how these temporal modes of governance are made durable, reenacted, expanded, or supplemented by different modes of governance, and how they are ultimately indicative of overarching temporal forms.

Ethical approval

Approved by ethics committee: Sociaal Maatschappelijke Ethische Commissie [Social and Societal Ethics Committee] (SMEC). Approval number: G-2021-4217-R3(AMD).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research is funded by dtec.bw – Digitalization and Technology Research Center of the Bundeswehr. dtec.bw is funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU.

Notes

1 This research is part of a larger-scale project called ‘SMASCH’ (https://www.smasch.eu/en/).

2 This council is an independent advisory board composed of representatives of all educational stakeholders.