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In this article, we reveal the nature and effects of data infrastructures on the authorisation of data that represent students and educational practitioners, including how such data can misrepresent and govern educational policy and practices in sometimes problematic ways. To better understand the governance capacities of data infrastructures, we draw upon notions of discursive practices and materiality, and apply these to a specific school management system, OneSchool, in Queensland, Australia. We show how data infrastructures both promote and impede educational practitioners' use of data in decision making and daily practices. This includes precluding information about students' (positive) behaviours and omitting important enrolment information about students' Indigenous languages. By doing so, we show how data infrastructures govern in ways that authorise the preclusion and omission of data, thereby representing students and schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data infrastructures are suffused with stories of their past, present, and future that govern their use. This article draws on research into 'OneSchool', the state schooling data infrastructure used to manage student data in Queensland, Australia. The political, social, and technical histories of OneSchool's development are shown to govern its current use. In interviews, users from across Queensland's education system shared stories of the ways OneSchool developed to both impede and create problematic truths about students, teachers and systems. The ways in which OneSchool became known as the single point of truth are used to illustrate how the narratives that accompany data infrastructures govern data, those who record the data, and those who are represented within the data. Identifying the governance of stories that travel with data infrastructures facilitates the development of protective and productive data behaviours for educational practitioners globally who are negotiating the discourse of digital educational governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]