Data dictatorship and data democracy: understanding professional attitudes to the use of pupil performance data in schools

Prefaceattitudes towards, pupil performance and progress data. Participants were drawn from the full range of teaching experience, level of responsibility and subject background, and from a range of schools. The project investigated, using a mixed methods approach, the extent to which staff in schools are satisfied with their level of understanding of data, whether they have sufficient time to engage with it, whether they require better training to interpret and utilise it, and the extent to which they think that the data tells them something ‘they don’t already know’. The research - a survey supplemented by a series of interviews - extends our current understanding both in terms of scale (by surveying teachers and not just heads) and in terms of focus (on the impact of school data-culture, and not just leadership, on data utilisation)