Towards an understanding of the political economy of earlychildhood education platforms. Pro Business or Pro Children?

Abstract

There is a rapidly expanding and proliferating number of commercial early childhood platforms, competing for market share in what has become a crowded marketplace. Early childhood platforms provide a wide range of functions including an all-in-one digital ecosystem offering a learning management system; social media communication between educators, families and children; invoicing and payment; attendance monitoring; data tracking; individual profiling; documentation; pedagogic advice and even policy interpretation. Platforms are a sociocultural and ideological phenomenon that ‘can replace or profoundly disrupt educational systems’ (Cobo and Rivas) and hence their advent demands urgent critical thinking. However, within early years there is comparatively limited research of platforms' impacts upon families, educators and children. The aims of this colloquium are firstly to open a critical space to think about the political economy of commercial education platforms and secondly, to ask questions about platforms' impacts upon the neoliberal subjectivities of educators, families and children.

Over the past 10 years, the EdTech industry within the UK early years sector has grown threefold, rising from £201 million in 2012 to £690 million in 2022 (Kerssens and van Dijck, 2023: n.p.). This investment growth has been unexpectedly driven by the global pandemic that acted as a powerful catalyst for a dramatic global shift to online education and widespread governmental experimentation with algorithms. COVID led to an explosion of early childhood commercial and commodified data and products in the form of educational apps, platforms, systems and digital services offering ‘techno-solutions’ to intractable educational and social problems.

Platform capitalism is based on the assetisation and extraction of value of personal data (Birch, 2023) charging rent to use the digital platform and mining users' personal data for profit (Srnicek, 2017; Zuboff, 2019). In addition to the monthly or annual ‘rent’ platforms charge for their services, platforms also have privileged access to the capture, rendering and analysis of users' ‘surplus behavioural data’ (Zuboff, 2019). ‘Surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff, 2019) demonstrates how platforms, along with multiple third parties, collect vast amounts of personal behavioural data. This personal behavioural data feeds algorithms that can be used to predict behaviour, accelerating, intensifying and personalising pedagogical interventions and ‘solutions’. Platforms organise digital activities as data relations that generate ‘new needs, new market niches and new profit opportunities’ (Grimaldi et al., 2023: 134).

Hugely profitable global platforms such as California-based Class DoJo, with its wealthy financial investors, are based upon an entrepreneurial Silicon Valley business model of ‘market making’, scalability, branding, rentiership and financial assetisation. Commercial market making requires the state to construct market possibilities for investors. Beyond this, considerable strategic networking is required with policy influencers, think tanks, academics, journalists and social media commentators to build and sustain global market scalability and profit (Williamson et al. 2023: 13). Platforms have different histories, approaches and business models but they tend to share a similar model of data production, communication, knowledge distribution and market transactions. They are dependent on multi-sided, large-scale networks and allow social communication between managers, teachers, parents and children. They operate as all-in-one education ecosystems in themselves mediating many forms of early childhood data production and distribution. Such ecosystems can be critically understood as ‘data enclaves’ in which users are captured in a process of techno-economic lock in (Birch, 2023).

Within the context of this special issue on datafication, it is important to note that platforms are built upon and amplify existing neoliberal architectures of market competition, individual competitiveness, outcomes and outputs and the measurement of performance: platforms ‘should be conceptualised in education as the superimposition of a (private) software layer on a pre-existing apparatus of governance by numbers which has emerged after decades of managerial accountability, standardisation and quantitative assessment’ (Perrotta, 2024: 9 added emphasis). This relationship between commercial techno-solutions, the privatisation of education and neoliberal governance is clear (Burch, 2021). For Ball and Grimaldi this relationship offers ‘a condensate of profit, governance and reform that marketises public schooling, opens up new commercial opportunities, displaces the state and at that same time enables the production of new kinds of consumers and workers’ (2022: 301). Within this digital economy, platforms may represent a further political shift from public to private governance and they may contribute to the ongoing redesign of the ‘educational space’ as a market (Ball and Grimaldi, 2022: 301). It is contended that platforms are disrupting, reimagining and governing public early childhood education systems in new ways and further critical scholarship is required to understand what might be considered as an incremental handing over of ECE systems to commercial providers. Platforms’ socio-technical and commercial power has led to an intensified governing, remodelling, reinscribing and colonisation of early childhood education and is enabling ‘new knowledge, new actors, new markets, new technologies and new experts’ (Jones, 2022: 72) into the early years.

Early childhood platforms

The Class DoJo platform is used by teachers, children and families in 95% of early years and primary settings in the United States, as well as in a further 180 countries and has been valued at 1.25 billion (Konrad, 2022). Through its gamified social media platform, ClassDojo datafies and competitively rewards compliant behaviour and discipline whilst encouraging an individualised competitive neoliberal ‘growth mindset’ approach. Class DoJo serves to intensify behaviour control and governance by exacerbating a culture of performativity and normalising the constant surveillance of young children (Manolev et al., 2019). Class Dojo initially ‘gifts’ its products as a ‘freemium’ to early childhood settings and subsequently offers ClassDojo Plus as a premium subscription service for parents at home (currently £63.00 per annum). Class Dojo Plus extends the same practices of early years classroom behaviour management from the school into family homes (Hartong and Manolev, 2023) and thus represents ‘a fundamental redesign of traditionally non-economic educational relationships, activities, and behaviours in economic terms’ (Grimaldi et al., 2023, 141).

US-based ABCMouse is valued at $3 billion (ABCmouse.com Early Learning Academy) and costs $60 a year for American families, with 11,000 educational activities and 850 complete lessons along its ‘Step-by-Step Learning Path’, designed to help prepare young learners for formal education. ABCMouse brands itself as ‘leading the way in learning outcomes’ and cites research that its users significantly outperform peers on state-administered literacy assessments.

Two early childhood European platforms, Famly, based in Copenhagen, Denmark and Tapestry based in England are much smaller than their American counterparts. Famly pricing starts from £79 a month for its basic foundation package, to £199 a month for its professional package and operates in 12 countries. Famly's branding and marketing offer a complete ecosystem for ‘early educators and families to collaborate, share the workload, and nurture children together’ (Famly. The Early Childhood Platform). However, behind this rhetoric, Famly's business motivations are clear. Matt Arnerich, Famly's Director of Brand & Comms brags about Famly's recent £14 million financial investment from Susquehanna Growth Equity (SGE), an American start-up investor (Arnerich, 2021). Moreover, with Famly's child:staff ratio planning, it has moved into areas of administration previously operated by the Danish local municipalities.

The English-based Tapestry, developed by the Foundation Stage Forum Ltd, has more than 16,000 early childhood and primary schools with one million children. It is priced according to the number of children in a setting with primary schools paying £83.33 per month and centrally offers ‘a learning journal helping staff and families celebrate their children's learning and development … weaving the story of the child’. More recently Tapestry has become ‘a whole-school solution’ for primary schools from Reception Class to Year 6.

In 2021, following COVID, £7.5 million was awarded to ‘Digital Hippo’ to develop a national English DAP (Digital Assessment Platform) and the first assessment to be delivered through the platform is the early years Digital Reception Baseline Assessment (Central Digital and Data Office, 2022; Trendall, 2022). Here the state creates business opportunities in response to the ambitions of EdTech seeking to sell their products. In this way ‘the state is acting as a market midwife, fostering and forging an infrastructure within which the private sector can flourish’ (Peruzzo et al., 2022: 6).

Troubling the boundaries

Platforms act as intermediaries between between educators, families and children and, as with all platforms, communications can be accessed anywhere at any time, creating ‘porous boundaries’ (Flewitt and Clark, 2020). Albin-Clark (2023) has noted that this ubiquitous digital ‘rupturing’ of traditional boundaries across ‘public–private timespace-materialities’ troubles and reconfigures concepts of ‘parenting’, ‘professionalism’ and ‘children’. Platforms’ ubiquitous and liquid surveillance (Bauman and Lyon, 2012) extends and intensifies the reach of Class Dojo's corrective and coercive biopolitical power into children's homes. Families are co-opted by Class Dojo as ‘data monitors and opportunity maximers in order to optimise their children's educational success’ (Hartong and Manolev, 2023: 109) so that everyday relations at home are reconfigured into ‘educational opportunities’ to ensure their children's success in the competitive educational race. Parents become ‘professionalised’ as they monitor their children in required ‘schoolified’ outcomes and goals. As regards platforms’ impact upon children, Flewitt and Clark (2020) note that digital technologies can ‘provoke young children's creative, collaborative, inquisitive and playful meaning making’ (466). However, Stratigos and Fenech (2020) and Albin-Clark (2023) draw attention to under-researched ethical tensions and ‘troubles’ associated with children being online, and Stoilova et al. (2019: 41) note that ‘there is an overall agreement that children cannot, and should not, be expected to navigate a very complex, even for adults, online environment’.

Finnish early educators’ understandings of professionalism have been troubled and undermined by platforms and apps with their ‘easy solutions’ for the ‘modern’ self-improving educator (Pesonen and Valkonen, 2023). Platform techno-solutions engender an ontological self-doubt amongst insecure and poorly qualified early educators ‘who trust digital solutions more than their own professionalism’ (Pesonen and Valkonen, 2023). Stratigos and Fenech (2020) are concerned with the intensification and amplification of early educators’ work, particularly the use of unpaid time working from home creating techno-stress ‘with hidden labour and affective costs’ (Albin-Clark, 2023: 453).

Discussion

This colloquium has sought to understand how early years are increasingly captured in data enclaves with rentier contracts. Much more research is needed to understand and analyse the political economy of platforms and their impacts, particularly as regards equity. Critical discussion is necessary because commercialised platforms operate as ‘hidden markets’ (Burch, 2021) reducing the states’ roles and responsibilities whilst expanding the operations of private investors and capital. It is important to further understand how the geographies of power within early childhood education are becoming dispersed to EdTech and commercial platforms both nationally and internationally and to understand intended and unintended consequences. Within this, public early education and professionals are potentially disempowered as platforms become ‘involved in private governance relations that become unaccountable to the public’ (Grimaldi et al., 2023: 142).

The early childhood community could explore the possibilities of rethinking platforms away from top-down neoliberal governance and towards a local, contextually specific, socialist and child sensitive ethical approach. Such rethinking should include a feminist and post-human critical technopolitical literacy based upon ethical data activism and data justice that troubles, ‘fractures’ and ‘cracks’ the current hegemonic ideology of pro-technology (Albin-Clark, 2023). A posthuman ‘rewilding’ of technology might explore the entanglement of humans and others, opening spaces for ‘slow pedagogy’ (Clarke, 2022). All this requires a radical rethinking of the purposes of early education away from human capital production and towards the public values of social cooperation, sustainability and solidarity. The following questions are intended to provoke such a discussion:

How does ‘platform capitalism’ (Williamson, 2021) work with, change and profit from public early childhood education?

To what extent do platforms amplify and accelerate early childhood's governing rationalities of choice, individualism, competition, visibility, performativity and ‘school readiness’?

How do platforms change and intensify children's, teachers and parents’ subjectivities?

To what extent do platforms reinforce or reconfigure inequality?

How can the early childhood community further engage with platforms to ensure that they prioritise young children's needs, perspectives and vulnerabilities (Kurian, 2023)?