Abstract
In this article, I seek to extend the geographies of education, youth and young people by offering an account of the significant shifts taking place in contemporary English state education around the production and use of data. I present material from pupils, for whom the changes are putatively made, whose voices are absent in existing educational and sociological literature on data in schools. I do this through an exploration of one specific feature of school datascapes: the use of data to create and maintain a sense of ‘progress’. This is not progress solely as developmental fact, logic, ideology or discourse but as felt. This article draws attention to profound changes to cultures of education that are evinced in relation to contemporary proliferations of data, contributes to theorisations of affective atmospheres in geography and how they come to be known (as a question of both experience and method), and it advances a novel theorisation of progress ‘after the affective turn’.
Highlights
State-funded schools in England have over the last decade, as part of the rise of an ‘audit culture’[1] and the embedding of digital technology,[2] been instructed by successive governments[3] to give more attention to what data can do for education
Irrespective of what Mozart and Einstein might have achieved if only they had been able to benefit from these year 7’s target grades, teachers sense the need to maintain circulations of confidence to keep young people enrolled in the process of data creation which would allow for progress to be made and felt as having been made
Data are seen as having the affective quality of buoyancy, but this quality is contingent on the policy decisions which effect schools differently because of the relationship between a school, local people and post-mining landscape and the nature of the curriculum and the classed values and knowledges assumed to be of import.[77]
Summary
State-funded schools in England have over the last decade, as part of the rise of an ‘audit culture’[1] and the embedding of digital technology,[2] been instructed by successive governments[3] to give more attention to what data can do for education. The young people, a surprising amount of the time, appear to come out of these encounters with data feeling good – irrespective of their level, most of them are making progress.
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