Data-culture:investigating teachers' use of and attitudes towards attainment and progress data in English secondary schools

The study on which this paper is based proposes to get to go to the core of whether or not the intelligent accountability referred to by Government (Miliband 2004) is being achieved in secondary schools in England. It seeks to build on what is known of teacher attitude at the time of the introduction of contextualised value added measures (CVA), to aims to measure how awareness, perception and utilisation have changed since then, in order to see how ‘data rich’ schools have actually become and to investigate how this is impacting on classroom practice.It focuses on the practice and attitudes of teachers, not just school managers, and to get both a national overview and detailed personalised data. The ability to utilise performance data and teachers’ intellectual response to it go to the very heart of teacher professionalism in schools. It aims to investigate how schools’ data-management practices serve or hinder the development of positive data cultures