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

ABSTRACT 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 re-engineers 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.