The commercialisation of school administration: one school's enactment of a student management system in Aotearoa New Zealand

The intensification of data collection practices in schooling - often due to state accountability requirements - has resulted in the widespread adoption of commercial student management systems (SMS) in schools. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a New Zealand primary school, this paper investigates its adoption of a commercial SMS, and the ways this product reengineers schooling processes, including what student data is collected, how school decisions are made, and when work is done by staff. Through this analysis, we argue direct-to-school commercial relationships constitute a new configuration of public-private partnerships in education. We demonstrate the rise of a local education market for data management where responsibility is placed on individual schools to choose a commercial product that will interface with the needs of a public bureaucracy. We end this paper with a critical discussion about how the commercialisation of school administration affects the broader infrastructures of public schooling.