Conference Agenda

During recent years, European discussions on the datafication of Early Childhood have ranged from a political, commercial and educational need for more data on children to critical perspectives that emphasize the inherent harms that datafication brings (Bradbury & Roberst-Holmes 2017; Paakkari, Paananen & Grieshaber 2023; Pierlejevski 2019; ). This tension is still evident in educational policy and practice. Recently, however, datafication and the everyday practices of living with data have been approached from new perspectives. Bradbury (2023) suggests that, after a policy change in England de-emphasizing the importance of data collection, we now gain a clearer view into how datafication has become a part of being an educational subject. In cases where governments roll back demands for data collection, it may turn out that data is stillproduced just as eagerly and seen as a central part of Early Childhood Education. In Bradbury’s (2023) example, teachers see data collection as part of being a good teacher, and data as a way of improving their skills and forming a deeper relationship with children. In other words, as we are subjectified through datafication, data becomes a necessary component holding the subject together even in conditions where it is not expressly required.

This symposium brings together emerging research on the datafication and documentation of Early Childhood. The presentations foreground the scope of data surrounding children as data subjects in childhood institutions. They also discuss types of largely invisible work required from parents, teachers, and other professionals to sort, transfer and curate the data in order to be able to effectively use it as a resource or a toolin everyday life, or to negotiate necessary services for children.

In this paper I develop the idea of a post-datafication phase in education, marked by the embeddedness of data within practices, cultures and systems of power, rather than a process of datafication with increasing prominence of data. This is not to say that data use is static or unevolving, but rather than it has become normalised and intrinsic to the educational project to the extent that it is almost invisible (Bradbury & Roberts-Holmes 2017; Jarke & Breiter 2019; Pierlejevski 2020). Drawing on research data from projects in the early years in England, I consider how professional practices associated with data (collecting information on young children, taking photographs, logging observations) have become hegemonic in staff understandings of ‘good practice’, even when there is no expectation from government that data are collected (Bradbury 2023). Examples of early years settings which engage heavily with data collection via digital means, using platforms which structure their engagement with data, are contrasted with settings which outwardly reject such digital infrastructure in favour of informal humanistic engagement with children and families. Moreover, I explore how even the latter settings struggle to disentangle their practices from digital methods of collecting data, such is the embedded nature of datafication.

Bradbury, Alice (2023). "Devotion to Data: Early Childhood teachers’ negotiations of a policy-driven retreat from data in England". Datafizierung (in) der Bildung: Kritische Perspektiven auf digitale Vermessung in pädagogischen Kontexten, edited by Mandy Schiefner-Rohs, Sandra Hofhues and Andreas Breiter, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2023, pp. 155-176. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839465820-010. Bradbury, A., & Roberts-Holmes, G. (2017). Creating an Ofsted story: the role of early years assessment data in schools’ narratives of progress. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 38(7), 943–955. Jarke J., & Breiter A. (2019). The Datafication of Education. Taylor & Francis. Pierlejewski, M. (2020). The data-doppelganger and the cyborg-self: theorising the datafication of education. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 28(3), 463–475.

This paper argues that documentation in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) both addresses and generates worries about children. Although often viewed as means to safeguard children’s well-being, participation, and rights (Heiskanen et al., 2025), documentation also transforms culturally and socially embedded worries into permanent entries and data, reflecting specific political, institutional, and temporal contexts (Ferraris, 2013). Through a multi-sited ethnographic study of Finnish and Danish ECEC settings, we explore; how the datafication of worry shapes relationships among ECEC institutions and municipalities, and how different worries compete within these relations. Our research is based on fieldwork in five Finnish ECEC institutions (Heiskanen & Kuukka, 2024) and two Danish ECEC institutions (Schmidt, 2024). In Finland, the investigation focused on how new legislative requirements of ECEC were translated into new and more detailed means of collecting data on children and especially on the issues that ECEC professionals were worried about them. While these processes were meant and said to protect the rights of a child, they were directed by the need to operate following the administrative and economical logics of municipal decision-making. In Denmark, we shed light on how datafied worries about children’s development and parental care, which pedagogues are expected to document, can overshadow pedagogues' everyday worries related to social inequality in children’s lives. While the first two worries are institutionally recognized and datafied, the third worry is not and becomes silent. All together, we question whether 'taking care of worries' through documentation sometimes overshadows 'taking care of children' in their actual and lived circumstances.

Ferraris, M. 2013. Documentality: Why It Is Necessary to Leave Traces. New York: Fordham University Press. Heiskanen, N., Poikola, M., & Franck, K. (2026). Metanarrative review of documentation as a social phenomenon in early childhood education and care. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 47(1), 81–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2025.2581186

As the role of the data infrastructures has expanded (Decuypere et al 2025, Piattoeva & Saari 2022), data has become a central component of the life in childhood institutions, both from the side of children and families and the professionals working in the sector. As Bradbury’s (2023) findings seem to suggest, data is indeed a central subjectifying force and, as such, cannot easily be set aside or forgotten. Concurrent with attempts to rein in the data infrastructures of Early Childhood Education and decrease the dependency on Big Tech platforms (Macgilchrist et al 2024), we see a constant need for the parents and professionals to navigate, contextualise and use various data as part in their everyday activities. Based on the findings of DataChild, a research project on Data activism and social justice in childhood institutions, we outline two modalities of living with data (Kennedy 2018) in the lives of families and the professionals working with in childhood institutions. From the side of the families, the ability to operate in data networks emerges as part of fundamental parenting skills. This can also be seen in a general platformization of parenthood (Hartong & Manolev 2023). A mostly invisible thread of data labour is woven into the fabric of everyday parenting. In our interviews with families, constant management, transportation and curation of data is presented as a necessary activity that families undertake in order to guarantee their children the support or services they need. Keeping up with and controlling the expanding data networks is seen as simultaneously necessary but ultimately impossible part of parental expertise. From the side of the professional working in childhood institutions such as maternity clinics, schools, child services or hospitals, negotiation with data emerges as an intergral part of their expertise. The professionals act as mediators between the data infrastructures and the families, informing the families why certain things cannot be stored in the system and how data inscriptions are formulated in specific ways in order to secure desired outcomes.

Decuypere, M., Brandau, N., Hartong, S., Joecks, L., Ortegon, C., Loft-Akhoondi, A., Vanermen, L. (2025). Tracing the infrastructural unfolding of (edtech) events through hybrid team ethnography. Learning, Media and Technology, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2025.2458667 Hartong, S. & Manolev, J. (2023): The construction of (good) parents (as professionals) in/through learning platforms - In: Tertium comparationis 29 (2023) 1, S. 93-116.DOI: 10.25656/01:28048; 10.31244/tc.2023.01.05 Kennedy, H. 2018. “Living With Data: Aligning Data Studies and Data Activism Through a Focus on Everyday Experiences of Datafication”. Krisis | Journal for Contemporary Philosophy 38 (1): 18-30. https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.38.1.37184. Macgilchrist, F., Jarke, J., Allert, H. et al. (2024). Design Beyond Design Thinking: Designing Postdigital Futures when Weaving Worlds with Others. Postdigit Sci Educ 6, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00447-z Piattoeva, N., and A. Saari. 2022. “Rubbing Against Data Infrastructure (s): Methodological Explorations on Working with (in) the Impossibility of Exteriority.” Journal of Education Policy 37 (2): 165–185. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2020.1753814