🗓️ Tuesday 20 May 2025  🕑 14:00-15:00

• 🟢Theme: Critically exploring data-driven technologies and practices in digital education

How platformised data collection practices in state primary schools in England mediate the parent-child relationship

Talia Kelly

Recording

Abstract

England’s state primary schools are settings characterised by intensive data production increasingly curated by digital platforms. While much research has focused on how datafication is reshaping schools and childhood, this study examined the impact of educational platformised systems on the parent-child relationship. It drew inspiration from Deleuze’s work on control societies which shifts the discussion on contemporary power formations beyond Foucault’s enclosed environments of discipline towards new systems characterised by flexibility, surveillance (or dataveillance) and modulation leveraged through digital technologies.

The project employed a comparative case study design that focused on two contrasting schools from different socioeconomic backgrounds and locations. Data was generated through interviews and documentary analysis of learning platform SeeSaw and its promotional materials. In the qualitative tradition, Braun and Clarke’s Reflexive Thematic Analysis was used to determine the lived experiences of parents, patterns within teachers’ pedagogical approaches and the rhetoric residing within platform architectures.

Results demonstrated that platformised education compels a profound shift in the interrelationships between parents, children and teachers by emphasising responsibilised over responsive practices of care. This was apparent in how platform usage held teachers responsible for family engagement and positioned parental responsiveness as a form of care-receiving as well as caregiving.

Further findings indicated an intensification of the pedagogical figure of the parent, particularly amongst affluent communities, and the manifestation of new behaviours in children across different socioeconomic groups. Accordingly, education platforms and their associated practices modify educational values, produce new subjectivities and penetrate connections and relations between parents, children and teachers through novel perceptions of care.

This research highlights the need for wider governance to empower schools, teachers and families to engage with and challenge issues of data justice effectively. It contributes to contemporary debates on the politics, problems and potential of data-driven approaches when raising and educating children.