Basil Bernstein wrote extensively about official educational knowledge, pedagogic recontextualisation and pedagogic identities. However, his theoretical oeuvre tended to focus on the textual rather than the affective aspects of policy recontextualisation. In addition, his work on the realisation of official pedagogic identity positions at the level of schooling institutions remained in an embryonic form, not fully developed. In this paper, I elaborate on the affective dimensions of policy recontextualisation by exploring institutional defences, namely teacher anxieties, produced by data-driven performativity. I draw on data from two research partnership projects undertaken with schools servicing vulnerable, high poverty communities in Australia to develop my ideas. Firstly, I explore how institutions develop defensive structures to deal with the anxieties of staff working with young children living in poverty. Secondly, I explore the affective dimensions of dealing with data-driven performativity policies by a school leadership team over the period of two research projects (2009–2016). I examine the professional anxieties induced by data performativity in the early days, and then explore how a research intervention re-circulated affects and enabled the staff to develop more ambivalent relations to data.