Introduction

The following quotation is from an academy principal:

What is being said is how surveillance works to control staff performance through number production and evaluation, where data dominates what matters in regard to educational purposes. The professional can only know about the ‘business’ of that school if the numbers ‘add up’ in order to determine which activity is worthwhile, and this can only be through self-regarding forms of leaders, leading and leadership. And so: ‘I suppose being a head means to me, right now, is about having that leadership and having that … vision and having that drive’ (Courtney and Gunter 2015, p12). This professional is ventriloquising the orthodoxy of transformational leadership, where the use of visioning and missioning enables the elite leader to narrate the meaning of data and so determine what this means for practice. It seems that selecting data and using it to make performance claims by smoothing a narrative is what matters in a high stakes context of biopolitical distinctiveness. I intend examining how this is integral to segregating the system by using Arendt's (2003) thinking about responsibility and judgement where she identifies what happens when people are rendered thoughtless, particularly in how a situation is framed and understood through fabricated myth-making. The deployment of the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity (EPKP) to the creation of ‘data-rich’ schools in England enables an examination of a form of depoliticisation by calculation where the interplay between standards, numbers and school leadership is being deployed to change identities and practices. The state has been able to make contractual alliances with elite individuals, companies and networked knowledge producers who have used particular ideologies in order to present a seductive, trainable and measurable model for the modern professional.