‘Datafication’: The tension between accountability and the ‘ethic of care’ in primary teaching

ALICE CUST-HUGHES, PRIMARY SCHOOL TEACHER, ELMHURST PRIMARY SCHOOL, UK

Current research on teacher professionalism has highlighted the importance of supporting a strong teacher professional identity, both to promote high-quality teaching and learning and to combat the current recruitment and retention shortage (Müller and Cook, 2024). This piece explores research undertaken as part of an MA dissertation on how the use of data in schools has impacted on primary teacher professional identity. Because teachers in primary schools typically teach the same class of children each day (or regularly), there is a significant emphasis on human relations (Jeffrey, 2002), with a particular focus placed on an ‘ethic of care’ (Osgood, 2006; Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes, 2018). This ‘ethic of care’ can conflict with the demands that certain methods of data usage place on primary teachers. The question, then, is what impact this conflict has on primary teacher professional identity. And what are the implications of this in the face of a teacher recruitment and retention crisis in the English state system?

‘Datafication’ and accountability

 ‘Datafication’ is a term coined by Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes (2018) to describe the increased use of data in schools, not as a tool used to promote pupil progress but as a determining factor in judging school effectiveness and teacher performance and in defining the abilities of a child. Such data use affects what teachers do, compelling them to teach and act in specific ways to meet the demands of the data being collected. As described by Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes (2018), the use of data is ‘not simply a record of what [is] happening in the classroom, but a determining factor’ (p. 51), with teachers becoming ‘professors of data’ (Lewis and Holloway, 2019, p. 35).

Data is a tool by which teachers and schools are held accountable, through the use of published league tables, national standardised testing and teacher appraisal targets. Indeed, teachers who do respond to the demands of data are seen as ‘good’ teachers (Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes, 2018) and these teachers are ‘most valued for demonstrating a disposition favourable to data’ (Lewis and Holloway, 2019, p. 37). Rather than using data to ‘support pupil learning’, the government report on ‘Making data work’ found that data is all too often used for ‘monitoring and compliance’ (Teacher Workload Advisory Group, 2018, p. 4) purposes.

This has become more apparent in recent years in primary education, since the 2010 coalition government was formed and primary education became the focus of government policy on assessment (Braun and Maguire, 2018). This materialised in the form of the phonics screening check for Year 1 and the introduction of a baseline assessmentWhen referring to early years education, a measurement of a child’s performance conducted within a few weeks of them starting school in Reception, with a focus on literacy and numeracy. in Early Years. As a result, primary school teachers have become adept at using data not simply to inform what they do in the classroom to support pupil progress, but also as evidence to prove that they have ‘performed’ to a particular standard.

An ‘ethic of care’

How does this relate to teacher professional identity? Firstly, it has impacted teacher autonomy. Research by the OECD acknowledges the impact of ‘accountability and control in… education systems’ (Suarez and McGrath, 2022, p. 7) on the ability to develop a strong teacher professional identity. For example, Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes (2018) found that many teachers felt a loss of control in relation to the introduction of the Early Years baseline assessment, and Finn (2016) found that teachers often felt obligated to ‘serve the data’ (p. 38), which conflicted with their own views on what best suited their students.

The focus on human relations (Jeffrey, 2002) can be seen as a particularly important trait in primary schooling. Teachers play a pastoral role in nurturing the children in their classes, and close links develop between primary schools and local communities (Braun and Maguire, 2018). Tensions can therefore arise when teachers attempt to navigate the requirements of data as a monitoring tool that simplifies children to a score or a grade. Often, teachers find that this is reductive when compared to their everyday experiences of interacting with children and all their complexities. This can have a detrimental effect on teacher professional identity. For instance, Braun and Maguire (2018) found that prioritising academic success over children’s wellbeing risked harming teachers’ ‘idealised identity’ (p. 10), and in their study of a primary teacher leaving the profession, Towers and Maguire (2017) found that a teacher’s desire to care for and nurture the children in her class was often at odds with the values of the school’s leadership, which were based entirely on assessment results.

My own small-scale study of primary teachers in London found many instances of frustration at the complexities of children being reduced to a number. The teachers whom I interviewed expressed concern that the socio-economic background of their children disadvantaged them in the eyes of the data and that data use impacted negatively on children. For example, one teacher noted that their pupils lacked the cultural capital to understand some of the text material in a reading test, while another expressed frustration that a child with a challenging home life was still reduced to a score in the data and in accompanying conversations around the data with the senior leadership team. These findings confirmed issues of tension between an ‘ethic of care’ that the teachers demonstrated for the children in their class and the demands of satisfying the requirements of certain types of data use.

The importance of a professional identity

The importance of a strong teacher professional identity cannot be understated. As the OECD report on this highlights, it is a key driver of quality in teaching (Suarez and McGrath, 2022) and, as Müller and Cook emphasise, it ‘impacts teachers’ self-efficacy, teaching quality [and] motivation’ (2024, p. 9). Certainly, an accountability agenda, of which certain types of data use form a primary tool, is in danger of eroding this professional identity, as it removes teacher autonomy, leaving ‘little room for defining the roles and values that teachers themselves consider the heart of their identity’ (Suarez and McGrath, 2022, p. 7). 

While data can provide teachers with invaluable information, allowing them to adapt their practice for the benefit of their pupils, it is vital that this remains the focus, over data as a tool to monitor and ensure compliance. Data related to children’s academic performance should be analysed and discussed within its context and, as the ‘Making data work’ report recommends, with a clear purpose and an awareness of its limitations (Teacher Workload Advisory Group, 2018). Additionally, primary teachers should be involved in the analysis of data as ‘experts’ that can give a ‘full’ picture of each student, while a ‘lack of clarity amongst teachers as to its purpose’ (Teacher Workload Advisory Group, 2018, p. 4) should be avoided. In short, data should be a tool to support progress and attainment rather than the overall judge of it.

It is particularly important to consider the development of teacher professional identity within the context of the current retention and recruitment crisis in the English state school system. Recent figures suggest that over a tenth of early career teachers will leave teaching after a year, and within three years this will increase to a quarter (Peirson-Hagger, 2024). What is notable is that there appears to be a direct link between those leaving the profession and the erosion of their professional identity. The chief executive of the National Association of School-Based Teacher Trainers has described a dissonance between what new teachers expect the job to entail and the reality: many early career primary teachers want to develop children ‘holistically’, but the reality that they face is that they instead become number-crunchers (Peirson-Hagger, 2024). Similarly, work by the Teacher Workload Advisory Group warned that holding teachers to account for things that they can’t always control (e.g. assessment data) risked ‘burnout and ultimately attrition from the profession’ (2018, p. 17).

While the new Labour government has made moves to tackle the emphasis on a high-stakes accountability system, with the removal of performance-related pay and OfstedThe Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills – a non-ministerial department responsible for inspecting and regulating services that care for children and young people, and services providing education and skills single-word gradings, there needs to be a wider consideration of the value that we place on a primary teacher’s ability to achieve specific numerical results, balanced with the holistic care that they are able to demonstrate in their classroom. This would surely have a positive impact not only on primary teachers and their professional identity but also on their students’ experiences of school, and a happy outcome from this would hopefully be more primary teachers choosing to remain in the profession.