Setting by numbers: datafication processes and ability grouping in an English secondary school

ABSTRACT

With the rise of accountability policies since the early nineties, the daily operation of English schools has profoundly changed. Through the in-depth analysis of ability grouping practices in one English secondary school, this paper aims to explore how the accountability shift and datafication impacted the practice of student grouping and students’ experience of education. The paper documents how an English secondary school which had fully endorsed the comprehensive ideal gradually shifted from mixed ability teaching to a rigid system of hierarchically arranged attainment-based grouping structure over a period of decades, and explores the pedagogical dilemmas that data-driven governance generates. The paper concludes that the school’s data-driven practice creates an environment of competition and an experience of incessant insecurities for the students which unsettlingly echo the culture of the late neoliberal labour market.

KEYWORDS:

• Ability setting
• accountability
• datafication
• data-driven education management
• student grouping

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In the UK pedagogical discourse, the term ‘streaming’ refers to grouping pupils into classes for all or most of their lessons based on their measured ability, and the term ‘setting’ refers to grouping pupils in a given year group into classes for specific subjects, but not across the whole curriculum, based on their measured abilities.

2. Academy schools are state-funded schools in England which are directly funded by the Department for Education and independent of local authority control. The number of academies grew dramatically under the coalition government, from 203 in May 2010 to 6000 in 2017 of which about 4300 were converter academies. The three main types of academies are sponsored academies, converter academies and free schools. Sponsored academies and converter academies were formerly maintained by local authorities.

3. Source: https://www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk.

4. The group aimed to reintegrate learners to mainstream classes by the end of year eight the latest.

5. Taylor et al. 2019, 15) similarly found that both initial group allocation and movements between sets were typically based on a combination of assessment data and subjective, ‘potentially biased teacher perceptions’.

6. Taylor et al. 2019) found that financial and practical (such as timetabling) factors played a significant role in how decisions were made about grouping structures and thus had an impact on the equity of allocation.

7. Due to limitations of space, I can only briefly comment on how the pathways affected students’ study choices. Regarding GCSE option choices, in the year 8 cohort, 43% of the M pathway students’ study choices were optional ‘academic’ or EBacc subjects (Languages, History, Geography, and Sciences), while this ratio was 33% in the F pathway and 22 % in the T pathway.

8. The four group interviews conducted in the 8F3 class are referred to as BB-GD1, BB-GD2, BB-GD3, and BB-GD4. Altogether 19 students participated in the group discussions, two students did not take part as they were absent at the time of the discussions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the doctoral studentship of the Economic and Social Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Eszter Neumann

Eszter Neumann is a sociologist of education. She obtained her PhD at King’s College London in 2018. Her research concerns education policy making in England and Hungary, interethnic relations in schools, the production of social inequalities and normalization processes in schools. Her research approach has been profoundly inspired by policy sociology, ethnography of education, and action research.