When platformisation meets schooling: exploring teachers, students and parents’ experiences of digital platform use

The use of digital platforms in education has rapidly proliferated with schools adopting a range of tools to support them with everyday administrative, pedagogical, and communicative functions. This has resulted in intense forms of platformised education and the reshaping of compulsory schooling in multiple ways. Digital platform use is seen to create a range of opportunities, but it also raises urgent questions about how platformisation is changing schooling. Drawing on findings from a qualitative study, this paper explores how platformisation is experienced by school leaders, teachers, students, and parents in two secondary schools in England. While the streamlining of administrative and teaching and learning operations, organisational effectiveness and the ease of communication appear to be valued, our findings show how school platformisation can also normalise monitoring and surveillance, contribute to the professionalisation of parenting, resulting in digital exclusion, and impacting teachers’ digital wellbeing. This paper provides valuable empirical insights on how schooling has become entangled with platformisation in complex ways and the implications this has for teachers, students, and parents. It contributes to the growing body of research in the field of platform studies and offers critical accounts that can inform future policymaking, research, and practice.