Digital data techniques and technologies : Reshaping the roles and responsibilities of school leaders

The intense desire for quantified knowledge under a datafied regime has produced an array of technologies that serve to simplify the complexities of social existence into simple, comparable forms. Such technologies and their associated logics have come to dominate schooling practices in recent times (Hardy & Lewis, 2017) and subsequently affect systems of education, at both the level of policy (e.g., state education departments) and the level of practice (e.g., the individual school and leaders). Discourses of school performance are primarily linked with quantified ways of knowing (Sahlgren, 2023), effectively describing how ‘what counts’ is that which can be counted in Australian schooling systems (Lingard et al., 2016; Mockler & Stacey, 2021). A key aspect of this agenda revolves around digital data platforms; technical instruments tasked with producing datafied knowledge about schools on the premise that they offer a more neutral, objective and comparable view of how things are (Hartong, 2019).

This thesis examines how digital data platforms shape how educational leadership can be, and is, enacted within schools. I draw on a theoretical framework of digital policy sociology to examine two empirical cases, Panorama and Scout, which are digital data platforms that operate in the Victorian and New South Wales public schooling contexts respectively. Each of these platforms operate as part of broader platformed infrastructures which include the various policies and practices that become mobilised by each platform and their associated logics. Deploying Comparative Case Study (CCS) (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017) as methodology, I draw on a range of data, including core information pertaining to the platforms themselves, in addition to policy documents, artefacts and interviews with school principals, to demonstrate the complexity of these arrangements. I employ Jackson and Mazzei’s (2012) ‘thinking with theory’ approach to emphasise the need to problematise the policy problems being generated in and by the platformed infrastructures. Specifically, I emphasise the productive nature of the platformed infrastructures in terms of how they produce foundational, temporal and relational conditions in which educational leaders enact their work.

This thesis aims to contribute to the field of critical research through building on the existing literature on datafication in education and its implications. It is not my intention to ascertain the effectiveness of digital data techniques and technologies in spaces of educational leadership. Rather, I seek to problematise the way leaders can (and do) think about their schools in terms of the platformed performance metrics that are embedded into education systems more broadly through policy. This thesis implores the need for continuing critical interrogation into school performance mechanisms that position school leaders and their work in very specific ways.

This work © 2025 by Sarah Langman is licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).