Metricisation in school: an affective and epistemic injustice

Neither the Rawlsian distributive model of justice nor Fraser’s (2008) three-dimensional model, based on principles of redistribution, recognition and representation, are sufficient to explain inequality in education. Both perspectives misrecognise how affective care relations operate as a discrete and relatively autonomous set of social practices, and how epistemic injustices impact participatory parity. The goal of this article is to show how metricisation exacerbates both affective and epistemic injustices, which, in turn, compound the classism and ableism of education. Being hierarchically classified in school means being future-framed by a series of life-defining metrics specifying your capabilities. For many, the result is a definition that sets them apart as lacking appropriate educational currency (cleverness) defined in terms of abstract verbal and logical-mathematical reasoning. This exposes them to public shaming and humiliation, which, while exacerbated by tracking, works independently alongside it. The cleverness devaluation provides a moral and political justification for hierarchical ordering, an ordering that is incontestable as children lack epistemic credibility. Drawing on published research examining the impact of rating and grading children in school, and on a reanalysis of data from a major study of inequality in education undertaken by the authors, the article examines affective and epistemic injustices and the role of metrics in these processes. A key message of the article is that the use of tests and metrics purporting to determine and order children’s educational ‘ability’ or ‘intelligence’ leads to the hierarchical ordering that is deeply unjust in affective terms, and compounded by testimonial and hermeneutic injustices in school.