The ITTECF and educational research: the next version of a flawed vision?

In this article we discuss the view of educational research outlined in the Initial Teacher Training and Early Career Framework (ITTECF) document, published in 2024 by the UK Department for Education, in the context of debates about the relationship between educational knowledge and teacher education. Through an elementary bibliometric analysis of the changes made to the reference lists in the document since its predecessor documents (the Core Content Framework and the Early Career Framework), we show how the previous UK Conservative government sought to embed a scientistic approach to educational knowledge for teacher education in England, with research sponsored by the Education Endowment Foundation taking a leading role. Drawing on Foray and Hargreaves’s work, we demonstrate that the ITTECF illustrates underlying assumptions that educational research needs to move towards a more science-in-technology mode of knowledge production that aims to enhance the quality of educational knowledge, while minimising more humanistic approaches. This is exposed as problematic, given the necessarily values-rich, contextualised and holistic character of educational practice, and the centralising tendencies inherent in the production of the ITTECF and its preceding documents.