ABSTRACT
The emerging global education reform movement has signalled an increasingly global field of education policy governance and the rise of comparative data as an important governance tool. The use of data to measure, govern and alter settings should be seen as political. This chapter tells a story about numbers, how early childhood education and care services are being increasingly subsumed into global education governance processes through notions of quality represented and governed by data. It is a story about imagination that investigates how, as our efforts to ‘see’ more of quality early education intensify globally, the process of making certain attributes or outputs ‘seeable’ and governable also alters those settings. This story draws on the Australian National Quality Framework reform era as a context through which to critique the ideology and ambition that underpin quality data measurement processes and usages, and the implications for early childhood populations.
