ITTECF: Tinkering at the edges

Yesterday the Department of Education (England) issued a revised framework for teacher education in England. It is a harmonisation of the ITT Core Content Framework and the Early Career Framework, both documents that have governed our lives as teacher educators for the last five years. The accompanying review outcomes document, which is short and to the point, highlights five areas where the review has made recommendations, in response to ‘the sector’ and thus led to the harmonisation of the two CCF and ECF documents into what is now abbreviated as the ITTECF. They are:

1. Far too much repetition between the CCF and the ECF. This everyone can wholeheartedly agree with. In fact, in the sections beginning ‘learn that…’ under each of the 8 teaching standards, the wording has been identical (see example), making it therefore difficult for teaching students to reach the goal of learning what is written there, since it is likely that they will have to learn it all again, and be assessed on it, during the ECF process in the first two years of their teaching in schools. The review states: ‘The CCF and ECF’s similar but separate nature sometimes meant that there was unintentional repetition of ITT elements in ECF-based training. The ITTECF includes new wording on progression, setting out how knowledge and skills should develop across ITT and through ECF-based induction, to reduce unnecessary repetition.‘ ‘Unintentional repetition’ is a laugh! How could they have missed it? If somebody put the ECF into Turnitin as an assignment, the plagiarism count would be through the roof. So, yes, it’s good to harmonise the document. The challenge will be for teacher educators and school-based ECT mentors to decide which bits are which. The new framework makes an effort (‘new wording on progression’) but my first glance suggests that confusion rather than clarity will be outcome.
2. Contextualisation to subject and phase. This is also a welcome opportunity to allow context to speak to our roles as teacher educators, but the language of the review document, whilst acknowledging that we have a content-poor curricular structure in initial teacher education (deliberately), suggests that the Oak National Academy would provide more subject-specific materials for mentors and teacher educators, thus centralising the process still further. It also makes the outrageous suggestion that ‘ITT providers have the autonomy to incorporate the ITTECF as part of a full curriculum appropriate for the subject and phase that the trainee is training to teach.’ Anyone who has been through Ofsted preparation or been involved in the reaccreditation process and curricular rewriting that has gone with it since the ITT Market Review of 2021 knows that that autonomy is a complete fallacy. We cannot now even write lecture notes without showing where in the CCF it is referenced.
3. SEND: This is the one area where some improvements have been made, though whether they have the space within existing, pressurised PGCE courses to emerge is moot. However, a serious effort seems to have been made, and welcomed by some SEND professionals as a welcome step to inclusive teaching. The interplay with the NPQ for SENCOs, though re-emphasising the document’s ‘golden thread’ neoliberal credentials, does at least offer some continuity.
4. The evidence base has been updated: this would be welcome if it were not geared to the same set of technical, pedagogic ‘what works’ outcomes. Recent work by Jim Hordern and Clare Brooks demonstrates how the evidence base to the 2019 CCF was flawed, in thrall to the ‘new science of teaching’ and which marginalised or omitted large areas of serious educational thought in preference to technicising and instrumentalising the teacher’s work:  ‘With an overwhelming preference for this ‘New Science’ as opposed to other traditions of educational knowledge, the CCF encourages an image of teaching as a decontextualised series of interventions with narrow objectives, and thus implicitly marginalises wider educational goods and purposes and deprofessionalises teachers work‘ (Jim Hordern & Clare Brooks (2023) The core content framework and the ‘new science’ of educational research, Oxford Review of Education, 49:6, 800-818, DOI: 10.1080/03054985.2023.2182768)
5. Mentor workload needs addressing: As one of those people who puts workload onto mentors in schools, I do appreciate the need to reduce it. However, the response in the review is less than encouraging, and possibly goes in the wrong direction: ‘To support ITT mentoring capacity, we have introduced a new ITT lead mentor role and have made up to £25 million available to schools and accredited ITT providers in AY 2024/25 to support this, and to allow mentors time off timetable to access high quality mentor training. ITT providers will consider any prior learning that mentors might have completed, including as an ECF mentor, in order to avoid unnecessary repetition of training.‘ As welcome as the money might be (and it is not actually a huge amount when you think of the number of schools involved in the mentoring process), a lot of the training is done online through the various accredited providers (UCL, Ambition, Teach First, etc.) and is not mentor- or institution-specific or dependent. We work hard to try and support mentors in the ways that we want our vision of teacher education to play out, and the heart of that is not always coherent with the demands of the CCF. We want more for our student teachers and so we want more for, and from, our mentors. That creates its own pressure. The lead mentors mentioned above are simply going to be the new name for tutors in universities and teaching staff in teaching/ITE hubs in schools. This is rebadging rather than recruitment.

The real problem with this review is that it has failed to listen to the wider profession and wider research that might shift the game. It has failed to listen to educators. In a paper that I and two colleagues from northern universities submitted last week, we made the point that the way that the word ‘education’ was used was completely divorced from the process by which we ‘train’ ‘trainees’ – and this is no different in the ITTECF. Only in one place in the new document does the word ‘education’ stand alone as a noun referring to the process of children learning: ‘seeking opportunities to engage parents and carers in the education of their children’. All other uses are in titles, journal names, journal titles, organisational names and in the term ‘special educational needs’ or ‘educational research.’ This is a serious issue, and shows what the Department for Education actually thinks ‘education’ is.

This review is part of a failing government’s failing ‘recruitment and retention’ strategy, explicitly. In the paper we submitted last week we showed that the kind of teacher and the kind of education that the CCF produces are mere shadows of the kind of people and teaching that we want in our classrooms. Recruitment and retention is all very well if a government wants to replicate a teacher that is, frankly, not a thinker, and in some respects, sub-human. However, as Tanya Ovenden-Hope and I have argued in papers here and here, the status of the teacher in our culture is key to the recruitment and retention of teachers as high-status professionals. The review, and the document it produces, does absolutely nothing to raise the professional status of teachers: it does the opposite, standardising and technicising the teacher and the student teacher. Instead of seeking the health of an education system within its diversity, variety and beauty, it seeks instead to standardise and control in the name of a spurious ‘equality’ that it doesn’t believe in. It is mere tinkering at the edges.