Understanding digital educational governance: The case of OneSchool in Queensland, Australia

Abstract

This study explores the role of data infrastructuresnin thendigitalisation and datafication of state schooling in Queensland, Australia. The research focuses onnOneSchool,nas an example of a data infrastructure. OneSchool wasndeveloped by Queenslandrs education authority as a technological solution to the organisational problem of managing student information across all public primary and secondary schools in the state. A unique organisational viewman insiderrs perspectivemis provided of how a data infrastructure governs and is governed through (a) the macro view of state and national policies and (b) the micro view of individual educatorsn'daily practices. OneSchool became a digital policy instrument, engaged in the algorithmic interrogation of students, schools and schooling, constituting itself as the single point of truth.A bespoke bricolage methodological approach drawing on the Foucauldian concepts of discourse, power/knowledge coupling, and vital materialism is used to make sense of OneSchool as a technology of governance. As an linsiderr who worked within the state education authority during much of the development and implementation of OneSchool, I provide a lived-experience perspective. The combination of this insider positioning, and in-house development of OneSchool, enables longitudinal scrutiny of its previously undocumented history. An historic retelling through a Foucauldian-inspired genealogy, reveals the intra-active becoming of OneSchoolrs vital materiality that is understood through the materialist perspectives of Barad, Bennett and Lupton.nThis thesis provides a seldom captured, detailed organisational viewpoint of the creation and effects of data infrastructures across key hierarchical layers of Queenslandrs state education system. Analysis of interviews conducted with bureaucrats, technocrats and school leaders working in policy, data and project development teams reveal prioritisation ofnnissues relating to student behaviour, attendance and enrolment. Evidence is presented of the inter- and intra-activities that occurred between the human and non-human elements of data, policy and digital infrastructures. These elements are identified as bound together forming what I have termed the lDatafied Policy Spacer. The identification of the Datafied Policy Space, makes a significant contribution to knowledge about the interplay between data, policy and digital infrastructures. OneSchool is identified as being constitutive of this topological space, even as this wasnthe very space from which it emerged. A conceptual framework is thereby established with which to further investigate the interplay between nascent forms of data, policies and data infrastructures shown to progressively govern schooling practices more broadly in a digitalised world.nThe detailed evolution and effects of OneSchool provide new insights for researchers, policy-makers and practitioners on the nature and impact of the governancenofninfrastructures, and on the governancenbyinfrastructures. Participant responses to OneSchoolrs governance of their practices and data provide nuanced insights into the power of data infrastructuresr materiality more broadly. This thesis offers critical understandings of the ways data infrastructures govern, and insights that help empower educational practitioners to critically consider and indeed talk back to those problematic forces that residualise contextually relevant individual and organisational learning.nn