The ‘datafication’ of early years pedagogy: ‘if the teaching is good, the data should be good and if there’s bad teaching, there is bad data’

Abstract

Following the election of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat UK coalition Government in 2010, there has been an urgent intensification and focus upon early years numeracy and literacy and promoting systematic synthetic phonics. This paper argues that the current narrowing of early years assessment, along with increased inspection and surveillance, operates as a policy technology leading to an intensification of ‘school readiness’ pressures upon the earliest stage of education. The paper suggests that this governance has encouraged a functional ‘datafication’ of early years pedagogy so that early years teacher’s work is increasingly constrained by performativity demands to produce ‘appropriate’ data. The article argues that early years high-stakes national assessments act as a ‘meta-policy’, ‘steering’ early years pedagogy ‘from a distance’ and have the power to challenge, disrupt and constrain early years teacher’s deeply held child-centred pedagogical values.

Keywords:

• early years teachers
• datafication
• pedagogy
• neo-liberal
• assessment

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Peter Moss for his encouragement and critique of earlier versions of this article. Thanks to Dominic Wyse for initiating this research and to Alice Bradbury, Sue Rogers and Phil Jones for their confirmation of the analysis. Thanks also to the anonymous referees of this journal for their very helpful suggestions.