It has become common sense that educational reform interventions (such as student voice) must be evaluated to know if they have worked or not. The data-driven school sets (or is given) targets to meet through reform interventions; for example, to reduce suspension rates by a certain percentage, or improve attendance rates by a certain percentage, or improve the percentage of students attaining a particular standard of academic performance. As I foregrounded in Chapter 3, Stephen Ball (2003) has written about how data come to ‘stand for, encapsulate or represent the worth, quality or value of an individual or organisation within a field of judgement’ (216). It is taken for granted that reducing suspension rates is right, because a reduction in suspension is supposed to signify that bodies are speaking, feeling and behaving in a manner that is morally agreeable to others and that is right according to the principles of morality. It is taken for granted, in reporting the outcomes of particular reform interventions, that these outcomes are true – that reported outcomes correspond with the intervention. It is taken for granted that reported outcomes stick to bodies and sediment and congeal in schools: that a reduction in suspensions manifests an improved school, and that the school can continue to progress and build on these outcomes in future reform efforts. According to this common sense, collecting data as evidence of whether or not an intervention has worked enables the school to be accountable and transparent to funding bodies. Data thus become desired (Thompson and Sellar 2018) – particularly data that will demonstrate positive growth over linear time, as judged against predetermined normative standards of what particular reform interventions were intended to achieve.

These straight lines between problem, intervention, data and evaluation begin to crack when a reform produces perplexing affects and effects. Things don't always turn out the way we would prefer them to turn out. Voices may say things that some may not like to hear; the experience of ‘having a voice’ may not feel ‘empowering’; students having a voice may not engender the changes that are desired, and different changes may be desired by differentially positioned bodies.