The commercialisation of school administration: one school’s enactment of a student management system in Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT

The intensification of data collection practices in schooling – often due to state accountability requirements – has resulted in the widespread adoption of commercial student management systems (SMS) in schools. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a New Zealand primary school, this paper investigates its adoption of a commercial SMS, and the ways this product re-engineers schooling processes, including what student data is collected, how school decisions are made, and when work is done by staff. Through this analysis, we argue direct-to-school commercial relationships constitute a new configuration of public–private partnerships in education. We demonstrate the rise of a local education market for data management where responsibility is placed on individual schools to choose a commercial product that will interface with the needs of a public bureaucracy. We end this paper with a critical discussion about how the commercialisation of school administration affects the broader infrastructures of public schooling.

KEYWORDS:

• Privatisation
• commercialisation
• public–private partnerships
• data
• data infrastructures
• student management systems

Notes

1 Our use of the term ‘PPP’ in this paper is aligned with much critical education research that investigates tensions between public and private, profit and non-profit, and private good and social good (see for example, Robertson, Mundy, and Verger 2012; Verger, Bonal, and Zancajo 2016; Williamson 2018). We do not view PPPs as being inherently favourable, or positive, but rather in need of careful critique.

2 The National Student Index (NSI) is a database maintained by the MoE. The purpose of the NSI application is to allocate a unique identifier, the National Student Number (NSN), to every student enrolled in an education provider in New Zealand.

3 The Single Data Return (SDR) is a set of data items that are specifically required by the MoE and the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) for funding, monitoring performance against Investment Plans, publishing performance information, as well as statistical reporting purposes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jackie Cowan

Jackie Cowan is a PhD candidate at The University of Queensland and a senior lecturer in Education, Health and Human Development at University of Canterbury.

Anna Hogan

Anna Hogan is a senior research fellow in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership at the Queensland University of Technology.

Eimear Enright

Eimear Enright is a senior lecturer in the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences at The University of Queensland.