Chapter 6 provides an account of the ways in which high-stakes accountability frameworks produce a specific type of school that is driven by score-seeking practices. I referred to this type of school as the quantified school, characterised by full compliance with the metrics-driven demands from the education system, exceeding the statutory requirements towards output optimisation. The quantified school as an institutional form does not emerge in a vacuum but is sustained by broader demands, discourses, and imaginaries. Indeed, the quantified school emerges in response to a series of discourses around education quality, ‘excellence’, responsible parenting, and meritocracy. This chapter also suggests that the specific type of institution that results from this ‘turning around’ in response to the ‘hailing’ of the system, is an institution that relies on a set of technologies for the optimal production of metrics-driven forms of signification through the appropriation and exploitation of affect.

