‘Datafication’: The tension between accountability and the ‘ethic of care’ in primary teaching
Written by: Alice Cust-Hughes
6 min read
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
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Valuable comment on the perils of focusing on quantitative data to reveal the quality of education.