An Expert System on Flimsy Foundations: Teaching Expertise and the Early Career Framework

ABSTRACT

The paper seeks to identify how teacher expertise is implicitly and explicitly conceptualised in current English education policy in respect of the professional development of teachers. We focus specifically on conceptualisations of expertise in the Early Career Framework (ECF), both in terms of the policy documentation produced by the Department for Education and in terms of a selection of publicly available materials produced by the lead providers of the ECF. We aim to locate these conceptualisations in terms of broader sociological and philosophical debates about the nature of expertise and its relationship to professional work, in addition to recent research on the policy context of teacher education and professional development in England. Our analysis reveals the inappropriacy of ‘expert systems’ approaches to expertise in educational contexts, the underlying assumptions embedded in policy in terms of what constitutes high-quality teaching practice and the insufficiency of relying on an appointed advisory group and organisations preferred by government for identifying and iterating criteria for expertise.

Keywords:

• professional development
• teacher knowledge
• sociology of expertise

1. Introduction

Teacher education and professional development in England have been subject to a period of considerable upheaval since 2010, with the most recent five years (2018–2023) characterised by a highly controversial process of accreditation¹ of initial teacher education provision (Ellis, 2023) and the introduction of the Core Content Framework (CCF) and Early Career Framework (ECF) (which will in 2025 be superseded by a combined version (the ITTECF)). This has taken place within the context of an increasing crisis in the recruitment and retention of the teaching workforce in England (Perryman and Calvert, 2020), widespread industrial action and growing evidence of considerable challenges to teachers’ well-being and job satisfaction (Brady and Wilson, 2021). Recent reforms can also be seen as part of a longer-term repositioning of the state’s involvement in the production and arbitration of educational knowledge for teaching, seen most visibly in the overt foregrounding of the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) as the chief arbiter of the ‘best available educational research’ (DfE, 2019, p. 4) for the CCF and ECF. While there are good reasons why developments in England can be seen as something of an outlier, at least in the wider UK and across Europe (Mutton et al., 2021), it is also important to note some connections with developments in other Anglophone nations. For example, in Australia a proposed specification of a centralised curriculum framework has emerged as part of a recent review of teacher education (Australian Government, 2022), while in the United States the federal government’s development of the Institute of Educational Sciences and What Works Centre provides a template for the EEF in England (Barrett and Hordern, 2021), by modelling a scientistic approach to selecting educational research for teaching.

Educational and social policy reforms often carry with them particular conceptualisations of expertise, although these are not always explicitly articulated. Such notions may rest on assumptions about the purpose of professional practice or may reflect attempts to generate and sustain trust in the reform processes, governments or professionals themselves. For example, Eyal (2019) draws attention to the tensions between taking a technocratic approach to reforms, which may limit the degree to which debates that shape expertise are extended to interested participants or the wider public, and a more participative, pluralist and deliberative approach which may recognise the richness of varied expert experience but may risk inaction or stasis. High-profile perceived failures of ‘experts’ to solve problems (e.g., in recent time economists and global economic crises or public health bodies and pandemic responses) have to some degree undermined trust in professionals (Ipsos, 2023), and led to scepticism of individual expert judgement (Eyal, 2019). This is accompanied by longstanding concerns amongst some policy-makers regarding the extent to which teachers (and other public service professionals) can be trusted to implement polices faithfully, and the rise of technologies and performance management mechanisms that monitor teacher adherence to objectives (Gore et al., 2023). In education, schools and teachers are therefore subject to pressures to provide evidence that educational expertise has been used ‘appropriately’ in the context of policy priorities. Inevitably such accountability pressures have the potential to reframe how expertise is constituted and to determine which forms of expertise are acknowledged and which ignored, depending on what can be evidenced satisfactorily.

The paper seeks to identify how teacher expertise is implicitly and explicitly conceptualised in current English education policy in respect of the professional development of teachers. We focus specifically on conceptualisations of expertise in the ECF, both in terms of the policy documentation produced by the Department for Education (DfE), and in terms of a selection of publicly available materials produced by the lead providers of the ECF, who as a group of six² account for around 95% of provision (IES and BMG, 2023). We aim to locate these conceptualisations in terms of broader sociological and philosophical debates about the relationship between expertise, professionalism and the expectations of policy, drawing on the work of Eyal (2019), Gerrard and Holloway (2023), and Addis and Winch (2019), setting this within the policy context of teacher education and professional development in England (Ellis, 2023). We identify the influence of expert systems and technocratic approaches to expertise in the ECF, a narrow focus on decomposing teaching with the aim of developing expertise through ‘deliberate practice’, and the erasure or marginalisation of authoritative educational knowledge through an expert advisory process that offers no meaningful criteria for ongoing evaluation of educational knowledge for educational practice. The argument has some wider relevance beyond England, not least in the United States and Australia, where similar notions of teacher expertise have influenced some educational reform processes.

2. Conceptualisations of Expertise

Many debates about expertise can be seen to revolve around two interrelated questions. The first asks whether expertise is best seen as primarily located in individuals or externally in networks and institutions, and the second whether expertise should be seen as practical, tacit, embodied, situational knowledge or as a body of general, explicit rules formulated at a high level of abstraction (Eyal, 2019). The chief axis of disagreement has its origins in the critique of Dreyfus and Dreyfus (2005) regarding attempts to build ‘expert systems’ as edifices of seemingly reliable expert knowledge that reduce potential for human error. These authors claimed that at a high level of expertise ‘skill acquisition moves … .from abstract rules to particular cases’ (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 2005, p. 782), necessitating the capacity to develop an ‘immediate’, ‘intuitive’ and ‘situational’ response to the case at hand (p. 787). According to Dreyfus and Dreyfus, rules-based or procedural expert systems are therefore not able to replace the intuition and fluency that characterises expertise. This is echoed in the parallel work of Brown and Duguid (2001) which underlined the inevitable tacitness of expertise, foregrounding an ‘art of knowing’ (Duguid, 2005) that cannot be encapsulated in explicit propositions and procedures. However, while these authors may have convincingly argued for the inevitability of the tacit and the importance of ‘fluency’, this has not surmounted powerful arguments of the need for transparency and accountability in expert work, and the associated imperative to make expertise as explicit as possible – in the interests of openness and accessibility as much as to counteract the risk of error and perceived bias. Concerns about ‘producer capture’ and public service inefficiency (Talbot, 2011), as much as the breakdown in trust of professional groups, all lead towards pressures to inscribe ‘transparent’ expertise in systems and procedures and not rely solely on the (apparently) expert accounts of fallible individuals.

However, not least in the human-centred professions, such as health, social work and education, there are further questions which a systemic or procedural approach to expertise encounters. As Abbott (1988, pp. 44–46) outlines, while expert performance may require processes such as diagnosis and inference which necessitate some distance from a particular case (for example a professional may need to consult research studies to identify a problem accurately), the making of professional judgement necessitates that those human characteristics are brought back in so that any potential course of action is attuned to the nuances of the individuals involved (see Hordern, 2024 for further discussion). Assumptions that may be brought to bear about the efficacy of one particular course of action may be confounded by the situatedness of a context, which may be shaped by social and cultural dimensions and by the individuality of those concerned. A patient may, for various reasons, be less willing than another patient to participate in a treatment process and thus undermine it, just as a group of pupils in one school may respond to a pre-planned history lesson very differently than other groups. Groups have social, cultural and psychological histories that affect how they engage with ideas (James, 2009), just as individuals do.

With a systematisation of expertise comes further processes which have particular significance in educational policy and illuminate the exercise of power and its implications. Gerrard and Holloway draw attention to how expertise is understood ‘in relation to the construction and presence of “ignorance”’ (2023, p. 13), and in education this might mean the construction of teachers and educational researchers as ignorant of more rigorous ‘expert’ instructional strategies or research methodologies. It might also mean a type of ‘strategic ignorance’ (Gerrard and Holloway, 2023, p. 38) exhibited by policy ‘experts’ who seek to marginalise certain traditions or cultures not considered aligned with prevailing policy. The construction of ignorance can thus incorporate attempts at ‘erasure’ (pp. 39–40) of certain knowledge considered inadmissible, inappropriate or subversive. Any process by which knowledge is selected, appropriated, delocated and relocated between contexts for a purpose provides a space within which ‘ideology can play’ (Bernstein, 2000, p. 32), and therefore the systematisation of expertise offers ample opportunities for the construction of ignorance, the erasure of the understandings of certain groups, and the foregrounding of prescribed solutions (or specific knowledge) to solve perceived problems. An expert system is often portrayed as seeking to establish a base of high quality ‘objective’ knowledge for the profession, but the process of developing a ‘system’ offers opportunities to exert influence and exclude others – meaning that any supposed objectivity is always questionable. Furthermore, the embedding of an abstract set of rules and procedures that are cast as supposedly superior knowledge provides for the ongoing systemic exclusion of alternative perspectives.

Arguably, when expert performance is under the spotlight, and identified as a key constituent element of a policy improvement process, there is considerable potential for discounted claims to expertise to be cast as ignorant and sidelined in an attempt to implement change more rapidly and comprehensively. Policy agents may hold that it makes sense to clearly define what counts and what doesn’t count as expertise, to maximise the chances of fidelity in implementation. Gerrard and Holloway highlight how contemporary policy has constructed a view of teachers as ‘crucial for ensuring everything from economic stability to physical and social well-being’ and therefore ‘controlling how teachers exert their expertise’ becomes ‘hard to dispute’ (2023, p. 56). There is an impetus to put issues of teacher expertise beyond debate, to neutralise the politics of teacher knowledge so that teaching practice ‘can be nailed down, measured, directed and managed seemingly aside from the messy social relations of the day’ (Gerrard and Holloway, 2023, p. 85). Discussions about expertise thus move from the slow lane of academic study into a position by which the state and regulatory agencies are fundamentally involved in determining expertise with wider policy objectives in mind (Eyal, 2019). The positioning of teacher quality as the key element in educational improvement may therefore increasingly lead to attempts to codify, manage and accredit forms of teacher expertise that align with policy priorities. This codification and policy alignment moves the identification of expertise away from teachers themselves, and their individual and collective understandings of educational practice, which would be emphasized to a greater extent in the more situational or fluency-orientated conceptualisations of expertise (e.g., the work of Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 2005) outlined above.

The further consequence of this process of neutralization and standardisation of expertise is a bureaucratization. As attempts are made to codify and specify what counts as expertise in documents that are then used to evaluate claims to expert performance, the experts become those who are conversant with the codified ‘expertise’ and its underpinning ideas, and particularly those who are able to articulate this ‘expertise’ effectively in discussion with others as a means of explaining their performance (as Collins (2004) demonstrates). Those who implement the preferred codified version of expertise are also able to gain some protection for themselves against the risk that the assumed outcomes do not come about. A school that faithfully implements a new teaching technique authorised as expert practice by a state agency cannot (in theory at least) be held responsible if the technique does not give rise to the promised outcomes. Gerrard and Holloway provide an example of how a teacher ‘prioritises the statistical prediction’ regarding ‘what a student is capable of doing’ over and above their ‘experiential and relational knowledge’ gained through ‘daily work with students’ (2023, p. 71), a bureaucratic encroachment that can declare redundant the development of meaningful pedagogic relations. Gore, Rickards and Fray note how professional development ‘is often deployed as a key strategy to address the ‘quality problem’ but with this often comes extensive regulation, compliance regimes and ‘unprecedented … investment and interference’ (2023, p. 454) from external agencies. In such situations the exercise of ‘expertise’ risks becoming simply a performative process, detached from any real concern with things that might matter in educational contexts, such as the individual development and well-being of students. When expertise plays this role in a system, professionals can find themselves absolved of the responsibility to reflect critically on their practice. If the authorised expert procedures they have been provided with do not work as expected, teachers can hardly be reasonably be held accountable, unless of course those teachers did not implement the procedures as required!

Yet any suggestions that expertise is only shaped by dynamics of power and definitions of ignorance, and thus is largely arbitrary, are subject to considerable challenge. In many occupational fields some consensus exists around what counts as an acceptable standard of competent practice, and in fields such as design or construction the product of the practice stands as solid evidence of a standard of competence, thus providing for a useful illustration. Such products or outcomes can also be evaluated so that judgements can be made in terms of the level of expertise involved in their development. We could say, for example, that someone who can design and construct an igloo has a degree of expertise in igloo construction, and this can be demonstrated in a range of contexts and environmental conditions if the igloo performs its function successfully. There may also be igloo constructors who are relatively more expert by virtue of being able to construct more elaborate designs and rectify various problems that may emerge during or after the construction. Some igloo constructors may achieve sufficient acclaim from their peers, and wider society, that they take on increasing responsibilities as evaluators of igloo construction and mentors of novice constructors, with their expertise deemed ‘authoritative’.

According to Winch (2010) the capacity to make inferences between propositions and how to interpret eventualities, in addition to knowing how to evaluate new claims to competence, are core constituent elements of authoritative forms of expertise in various domains (including construction and educational practice). Furthermore, higher levels of expertise may relate to being able to ‘project manage’ a process, and to educate or mentor others who are seeking to acquire competence (Winch, 2010). In a discussion of teaching, Winch et al. (2015) draw attention to the importance of craft and technical aspects of teaching, arguing nevertheless that the capacity to critically reflect on the purpose and practice of teaching enables a more nuanced and ‘expert’ view of these aspects, and therefore the potential for better judgement. And this critical reflection may only be sustained via ‘the exercise of scholarship’ and ‘systematic enquiry’ (Winch et al., 2015, p. 206). This suggests that expert knowledge ‘in use’ (or practical knowledge) is by itself often insufficient for expertise – as Abbott (1988) outlines, the role of more abstract knowledge is important for novelty, creativity and reflection on purpose and what is ‘at stake’ (Rouse, 2007) in professional practice. Furthermore, perhaps particularly in human-centred professional work, we cannot avoid questions of ethics, personhood and wider meaning.

The question of how expertise is determined/defined also gives rise to questions of how expertise is updated to stay authoritative, and arguably these questions are much more closely related than is often realised. Expertise cannot be set in stone, as the notion implies an ongoing interaction with a world impacted by social, political, cultural and technological change. Thus there is little point in attempting to stipulate expertise without simultaneously identifying how that expertise can be updated and revised so that it can continue to meet changing demands. This can be inconvenient for those who would prefer to set up a system inscribed with a version of expertise as a means of improving and measuring performance, neutralising debates and heralding a problem solved. Closed systems that maintain a consistent structure enable comparison and the measurement of performance, and thus a degree of accountability, but the need to revise expertise suggests that the system itself must be sufficiently open to continual revision, thus making comparability and accountability more difficult. Addis and Winch (2019), instead of relying on a closed systems approach, point to the ongoing negotiation of criteria by which expertise can be judged by a community of practitioners as a basis for revisable expertise. For them any expert practice must have an ‘institutional foundation with its own set of implicit ways of doing things’ (Addis and Winch, 2019, p. 7) that underpins the making and revision of criterial judgements. Arguably, such a criterial view of expertise also necessitates a widely held agreement of the ‘goods’ provided by a practice and the standards of excellence that demonstrate expert performance of the practice (Hordern, 2021; MacIntyre, 2007). The criteria in use are only meaningful if they take account of these goods and standards of excellence, and develop iteratively to reflect them. Furthermore, as Biesta (2010) has argued, there are aspects of educational practice that must remain ‘open’ to enable educational purposes to be realised – a closed approach to expertise is profoundly inappropriate.

We now progress to examining how expertise is conceptualised in the current context of professional development in England, and most specifically in the ECF, which was introduced earlier. In so doing we articulate insights into what the ECF and the arrangements that surround its development and implementation suggest about how expert educational knowledge is viewed in current educational policy in England. The analysis is based on a qualitative content analysis of the ECF document itself (DfE, 2019), and a selection of publicly available materials issued by providers of the ECF, in particular handbooks and guidance documents produced by Teach First, the Ambition Institute and UCL IOE, three of the six commissioned providers who between them (as noted above) have been undertaking a substantive proportion of ECF delivery.³ The process of content analysis aims to identify implicit and explicit conceptualisations of expertise in the selected texts, enabling further critical discussion of how teacher expertise is conceived in these reforms.

3. The ECF is Underpinned by An ‘Expert Systems’ View of Expertise

According to the DfE the ECF was developed because ‘teachers in the first years of their career require high quality, structured support in order to begin the journey towards becoming an expert’ (DfE, 2019, p. 4), and this will provide ‘a platform for future development (p. 5). It is claimed that the ‘Expert Advisory Group’ (EAG) assembled to lead the development of the ECF and the DfE ‘consulted extensively with the sector to design’ (p. 4) the resulting framework. The epistemological underpinnings of the ECF are based upon an input of supposedly authoritative educational knowledge ‘independently reviewed’ by the Educational Endowment Foundation ‘to ensure it draws on the best available evidence and that this evidence has been interpreted with fidelity’ (DfE, 2019, p. 4). It is acknowledged, nevertheless, that ‘The ECF will be kept under review as the evidence base evolves. As in any profession, the evidence base is not static and research insights develop and progress’ (p. 6).

The development of the ECF as authorised ‘structured support’ for teachers can be seen as part of a broader initiative to put questions of educational expertise ‘beyond debate’, so that expertise can be codified in a systemic manner and polices can be implemented and change enacted in the way intended by government – as part of wider system reform. Questions of educational expertise are thus ‘neutralised’ (Gerrard and Holloway, 2023) by the designation of selected sources as the ‘best available research evidence’ (DfE, 2019, p. 4) available for teachers’ professional development, based on a particularly skewed notion of what constitutes ‘bestness’ in evidence for education (see Hordern and Brooks, 2023, 2024). The neutralisation is furthered by the centralised commissioning of preferred providers to deliver the ECF, and by the requirement that providers align with its mandated structure (Ofsted, 2023). The neutralisation of debate and the centralisation of provision management can be seen as an element of a technocratic approach that seeks to embed an ‘evidence-based’ approach to educational expertise, in order to drive through uniform initiatives that the government hopes will minimise ‘implementation deficit’ (Pressman and Wildawsky, 1984) and maximise the chances of wider successful policy delivery. Claims to professional development expertise are to be controlled within the system, rather than extended to teachers and teacher educators who may have considerable experience and willingness to contribute.

The neutralisation of debate around expertise involves a distancing between, on the one hand, the systemic generation of expert knowledge and, on the other, the mentors and early career teachers, who are charged with enacting their prescribed roles. This embeds a sense that questions of teaching expertise have already been resolved, and school leaders, mentors and teachers are being spared the trouble of considering them further. In Eyal’s (2019) terms, this reflects a decision to limit the ‘extension’ of expertise, so that those who do not align with the systemic view of expert knowledge have little influence. So in one handbook we see the claim that ‘We have designed this programme with expert influence, best practice and the most up to date research, to support you, your mentors and your ECTs’ (Teach First, 2021, p. 3), while in another we read that ‘We have drawn on the best available evidence around how professionals learn to … have a lasting impact … , but will do so whilst respecting the busy and demanding working lives of teachers’ (Ambition Institute, 2020, p. 1). An implicit hierarchy is developed between the research knowledge constructed for the expert system and the working knowledge of teachers and mentors. There is a lack of acknowledgement that the extensive experience of mentors, for example, might have led them to a view of teaching expertise that is at odds with that prescribed by the ECF and the provider handbooks. Moreover, there is little unpacking of the debates around what might constitute expertise in teacher professional development, or even an acknowledgement that such debates exist.

This neutralisation of debate about expertise also influences the conceptualisation of mentoring as instructional coaching in much of the ECF provision. As Spicksley (2023) has pointed out, four of the six main providers of the ECF are using instructional coaching as the basis for their mentoring, with the other two drawing on alternative approaches (such as the ‘educative’ and ‘ONSIDE’ mentoring outlined in the UCL IOE handbook (UCLIOE, n.d., pp. 34–36)). Furthermore, a meta-analysis of ‘teacher coaching’, described as a ‘promising alternative to traditional models of professional development’ (Kraft et al., 2018, p. 1), is the only study relating specifically to mentoring or coaching listed in the Professional Behaviours section of the ECF document (DfE, 2019), thus providing an indication to providers of a preferred approach. Instructional coaching embeds a ‘an inherently hierarchical relationship between the mentor and the ECT’ which comes across as ‘monologic’ as the onus is on the mentor to model ‘best practice’ for the ECT to imitate, but this also serves to ‘deprofessionalise mentors’ (Spicksley, 2023, pp. 52–53) as the modelling process is scripted and prescribed as part of a system in which expertise has already been determined at distance from the educational context. According to Teach First the instructional coaching model has been ‘deemed as highest leverage for teacher development’ (Teach First, 2021, p. 6), and involves the mentor using their expertise to show ‘what makes a teacher’s practice effective’ by ‘narrating their thinking process’ and ‘modelling teaching strategies’ (p. 6). Mentors are to become ‘familiar with module content and Mentor Handbook documentation’ and ‘are also responsible’ for ensuring ‘weekly interactions’ with new teachers occur and that they ‘complete relevant self-directed study’ (p. 6). Teach First also state that ‘evidence suggests that instructional coaching has a higher impact on pupil outcomes when compared to other forms of professional development’ (Teach First, 2021, p. 6), but there are no references to sources that might support such claims. What instructional coaching does appear to do is provide a mechanism whereby challenge and debate to the new orthodoxies of the ECF are minimised – new teachers and (implicitly) their mentors are constructed as ignorant – their experience and views are effectively irrelevant as the ‘mentor’s handbook’ will provide them with the (scripted) expertise required.

However, a mechanistic, closed systems approach encompasses not only the overall approach to expertise in the ECF but also how the process of professional development itself is viewed, as is demonstrated through the providers’ handbooks as much as in the content prioritised in the ECF. The assumptions that come with a procedural and mechanistic approach to expertise are in evidence, not least in the approach to designing the ECF programmes around a ‘a set of simple, repeating professional development patterns’ (Ambition Institute, 2020, p. 2). This is reinforced by stating that ‘Teacher improvement works best when it is focused on changing one aspect of practice at a time’ and ‘to ensure lasting changes in practice, teachers remain on a strand for the duration of the term’ so teachers can ‘habitualise changes to their classroom practice’ (Ambition Institute, 2020, p. 5). The focus on repetition and habituation with an absence of critical reflection echoes an ‘atomistic’ behaviourism that ‘decomposes activities into supposed constituent elements … in terms of which the performance of individuals can be measured’ (Jones and Moore, 1993, p. 386), an approach that has characterised much reform to professional and vocational education in England. Furthermore, there is no acknowledgement of the benefits for professional learning of participating in a programme of professional development together with others, or of the advantages of maintaining space for challenge and questioning claims to knowledge, so that insights into teaching processes can be shared and reflected upon collectively.

4. Deliberate Practice and the Decomposition of Teaching

The approach taken to classroom work in the Ambition Institute’s version of the ECF is primarily about the ‘decomposition of teaching’ which ‘isolates a specific aspect of classroom practice’ (McCrea, n.d., p. 6), which should then be repeated until a desired level of competence is achieved, a process known as ‘deliberate practice’. In a document entitled ‘Expert Edit’ that was produced to accompany the ECF curriculum, ‘the role of “deliberate practice” in early career teacher development’ is explored through a brief discussion of ‘the role that “goal setting” and “effortful practice” play in the development of expertise’ (McCrea, n.d., p. 4). The deliberate practice process has been promoted by the Deans for Impact organisation, who have worked with Anders Ericsson on ‘expertise development’ to pull together a set of principles that can be used to accelerate the development of early career teachers’ (McCrea, n.d., p. 5). Deliberate practice requires ‘setting goals that are well-defined, specific, and measurable’ and involves activities that ‘focus on improving a particular aspect of teaching rather than working toward broad, general improvement’ (Deans for Impact, 2016, p. 6). A high level of focus on a ‘specific element of classroom practice’ (Deans for Impact, 2016, p. 8) (i.e., specific tasks or techniques) is encouraged, with novice teachers needing to achieve sufficient competence before moving on to the next technique. Deliberate practice also rests on an acquisitive and narrowly cognitivist approach to learning (see Sfard, 1998 or Hager and Hodkinson, 2009 for a discussion), as ‘novice teachers and teacher educators should have a clear understanding of how students learn that is based in part on principles of cognitive science’, generating ‘mental models’ and ‘mental representations’ (Deans for Impact, 2016, p. 12), while other understandings of learning (that foreground participation, commitment or the development of collective and individual identity) are ignored.

The difficulty with applying Ericsson’s (2006) work on the ‘new science’ of ‘expert performance’ (and deliberate practice) to teaching is that his studies focus on goal-directed performance, and thus on the demonstration of high levels of skill and achievement in specific domains, with paradigmatic examples from music, sport and chess. While this research may have rigour and depth, the practices on which Ericsson focuses are not characterised by high levels of moral and ethical judgement (in the course of action), or by the need to constantly manage the varied demands and characteristics of a range of different individuals (e.g., children and young people). An expert guitarist or footballer may considerably enhance their technical expertise through decomposition and rigorous repetitive activity, but they are not faced with the complexity of handling the variable aspirations, demands and dispositions of groups of young people as a central part of their work. While Ericson’s work may be useful for examining the application of specific teaching techniques, the idea that ‘deliberate practice’ per se can act as a guide to the making of reasonable judgements about the best course of action for young people in an educational context would seem highly problematic.

However, what Ericsson’s work does encourage is the identification of demonstrable and evidential competence and expertise, and this fits well with the notion of an expert system in which teachers, as front-line technical implementers of the expertise canonised by others, can be schooled in a systematic and focused manner (at least in theory). It may be perceived that the implementation of policy objectives and evaluation of progress against those objectives is better served by a visible, codifiable and measurable conceptualisation of expertise, such as that offered by Ericsson’s ‘deliberate practice’. In the context of government education policy that seeks to improve measurable outcomes (e.g., in terms of international assessments) and sees teacher performance as a key variable, a systemic linear model of inputs (in terms of teacher performance improvement) and outputs (in terms of assessment outcome improvement) can be generated. Reforms to early career professional development informed by deliberate practice and Ericsson’s view of expertise can be evaluated, with results fed back into the system for further calibration.

Yet this aspect of the ‘expert systems’ view of expertise can be challenged from multiple angles, with implications also for how teacher professional development is understood. As noted above, in Dreyfus and Dreyfus’s (2005) work, as in Duguid’s (2005) and Winch’s (2010), there is an acknowledgement of the inescapably tacit dimension of much expert work. Given the contextual and situated aspects of teaching, including the necessity to work with young people with a range of backgrounds, aspirations and expectations, and the fact that each pedagogical interaction is shaped by the particularities of time and place, it seems deeply problematic to ignore the tacit and situated aspects of expertise in models of professional development. The UCL IOE ECF handbook nods towards this, in contrast to the Ambition Institute example above, in noting the ‘complex conditions’ of ‘teachers’ work’ and the need for ‘practical fluency … and the wider knowledge, experience and beliefs required to make judicious use of these practices in specific contexts’ (UCLIOE, n.d., p. 10).

But an expert systems approach which emphasises technical performance also sidelines questions of morality and ethics in the making of educational judgements. The human aspect of any pedagogical relation suggests that questions of values are inescapable and cannot be supplanted by technique (Dunne, 1997). A closed expert system necessarily excludes that which does not relate directly to its prescribed inputs or outputs, and this then leads to the marginalisation of ethical dimensions to teaching and a discouragement of any educational activity that deviates from that which is recognised as valid by the system.

Arguably the expert systems approach misunderstands teaching. Rather than acknowledge the longstanding precept that teaching is a negotiated relation between students, teacher and content (e.g., Westbury et al., 2010), the expert systems view concentrates overwhelmingly on what the teacher does in terms of technical efficacy. Both the accumulated experience of the teaching profession and the accumulated understandings and debates of educational theory are bypassed in an expert systems view, with implications for the character of the professional development in the ECF. At heart this is because a procedural expert system implies a causal functional structure which silences both the contextuality of educational activity and the ‘constitutive cultural practices’ (Jones and Moore, 1993, p. 388) of disciplinary inquiry and professional activity.

5. ECF, Designated Expert Groups and the EEF

An expert system is nevertheless not separated from human processes of decision making. The systematisation of expertise in pursuit of mechanical objectivity creates an illusion of impartiality and authority (Eyal, 2019, pp. 115–122), which seeks to mask the contested nature of expertise and the influence of particular assumptions. For any expert system to exist there must have been agents who somehow provide the ‘inputs’, specifying what constitutes expertise and how this is manifested in the system, and excluding other claims to knowledge deemed not to meet quality or appropriacy thresholds. As Eyal (2019) identifies, the construction of expertise involves asking if ‘all opinions enjoy equal weight’ (2019, p. 38) and therefore how widely to extend consultation processes. Limiting ‘extension’ to a select group enables conclusions to be drawn more quickly and a degree of supposed clarity to be achieved on expertise. In certain conditions – if the selected decision-makers are seen as authoritative and credible – this may build trust in the resulting system (Eyal, 2019).

In the case of the ECF the EEF takes the role of a gatekeeper of expertise, providing a guarantee that the ‘underpinning evidence’ within the ECF ‘has been independently assessed and endorsed’ (DfE, 2019, p. 2). However, the EEF is not independent of the DfE (having had a privileged role in support of government policy since at least 2016). For example in the policy paper ‘Educational Excellence Everywhere’ (DfE, 2016), the DfE stated that it would ‘work in partnership with the Education Endowment Foundation to expand its role in improving and spreading the evidence on what works in education’ as the ‘designated What Works Centre for education’ (DfE, 2016, p. 39). Moreover, if we follow Addis and Winch’s (2019) view of criterial expertise, the EEF is not in a position to determine the criteria needed to assess and endorse the educational research contained in the ECF as ‘the best available’ (DfE, 2019, p. 4). This is partly because the EEF assesses evidence on the basis of methodologies that do not in themselves represent the full range of high-quality educational knowledge (Furlong and Whitty, 2017; Hordern and Brooks, 2023). The panel report following the recent REF2021 demonstrates that educational researchers ‘embrace and develop a very wide range of research methods, reflecting its inherent interdisciplinarity’ (UKRI et al., 2022, p. 165), with rich contributions from philosophy, sociology and history, and this does not align with the research orientation of the EEF. Addis and Winch’s (2019) work is helpful here in suggesting that deep engagement with the purposes and goods of educational practice is necessary for assembling the criteria for assessing and endorsing a representative body of high-quality educational knowledge, and the EEF cannot do this alone. Even if there is an acknowledgement that the ‘evidence base’ for teaching ‘is not static’ (DfE, 2019, p. 6) the methodological predilections of the EEF, coupled with the particular assumptions of the expert advisory group (of which more below), will likely filter out claims to knowledge that do not fit with system objectives.

The design of the ECF was determined with the input of an ‘Expert Advisory Group’(EAG) with the DfE also claiming to have ‘consulted extensively with the sector to design the ECF’ incorporating ‘invaluable input from teachers, school leaders, academics and experts’ (DfE, 2019, p. 4), although who these were beyond the EAG is not clarified in the ECF. Indeed, it seems that any consultation that did take place was not meaningful, and that any reservations and criticisms of the ECF content were largely ignored in the final version (Rowe, 2023). There was also a ‘wider advisory group’ who were said to ‘provide further support and challenge’ (DfE, 2019, p. 2), consisting of nine members who are mainly school leaders, along with representatives of the Teaching Schools Council and the Teacher Development Trust. The existence of an EAG should not be taken as evidence that all group members participated equally or evenly in this process of shaping the framework, or that the group itself necessarily finalised the eventual ECF document (as this may well have been undertaken by civil servants working for the DfE). However, the membership of the EAG provides an indication of those considered worthy (by the DfE) of involvement in the process of developing the ECF – in this case there were seven members, including one academic from UCL IOE (now the CEO of the EEF), three school leaders, and representatives of the Ambition Institute, Teach First and the Chartered College of Teaching.

It is highly questionable whether the members of the EAG are well-placed collectively to make judgements about educational expertise. A number of the members of the EAG are also representatives of organisations responsible for delivering the bulk of the ECF provision (e.g., the Ambition Institute, Teach First and the IOE). Hanley and Kerr have drawn attention to the existence of ‘network connections’ amongst those involved in contemporary reform of public service professions in England, which ‘tend to privilege ideological compatibility and shared assumptions over professional experience’ (2023, p. 76). Through exercises in ‘policy network mapping’ they demonstrate the connectivity between organisations and individuals influencing education policy-making (including the ECF) and other aspects of public service reform (in social work), demonstrating how ‘expertise’ is embedded in networks and personal relationships. But this also comes with an underlying reductive focus on ‘what works’ while ‘leaving out contextual questions’ or explicitly unpacking the ‘interests and perspectives’ that are being ‘prioritized’ in reform processes (Hanley and Kerr, 2023, p. 81). The claims that the ECF brings together ‘what works’ for teaching (and systematises it) enables the EAG (and its associated network) to present themselves as authoritative, even if many of their methodological assumptions (see Wrigley, 2018), reductive interpretation of educational purpose and marginalisation of other aspects of educational knowledge (see Hordern and Brooks, 2023) have been exposed. Without substantive representation from experts in other areas of high-quality educational knowledge, it is difficult to see how the recommendations of the EAG regarding educational expertise are credible. While individual participants in the advisory groups may well have something to contribute to collective understandings of teaching, the groups themselves are not authoritative and do not demonstrate the capacity to develop and iterate requisite criteria for evaluating claims to teacher expertise.

6. Concluding Remarks

The reforms to initial teacher education and professional development in England foreground a deeply problematic and inappropriate ‘closed systems’ model of expertise built upon the flimsy foundations of the EAG and the EEF, neither of which (in themselves) are equipped to the task of identifying teacher expertise. As argued above, the view of teaching foregrounded in much of the ECF material (deliberate practice) relies on a view of expertise which is inappropriate for the contingent, people-orientated and ethical character of teachers’ work. The attempts to refine teaching processes through scientistic models of research and then embed these in prescriptive professional development materials generate a closed expert system which distances teachers from processes of inquiry and perceives them as implementers of the stipulations of others. Teachers’ own professional knowledge and commitment to their work, shaped through a mix of experience, learning from others and engagement with educational ideas (Orchard et al., 2020; Winch et al., 2015), are implicitly deemed irrelevant if they do not fit with the preferred view of the EAG, the EEF and ultimately the DfE.

The notion of making teaching expertise explicit and measurable via the expectation that providers and new teachers conform to the ECF stipulations plays a useful political role in the context of contemporary educational reforms. In an international context in which teachers are positioned as a key factor in ‘improving’ education systems (Schleicher, 2012), reforms such as the ECF are intended to generate public trust in a policy framework designed to solve problems relating to teacher quality and recruitment and retention, and thereby supposedly improve educational outcomes. By stipulating a body of expertise that has the backing of the government’s preferred arbiter of educational knowledge (the EEF), and a EAG weighted heavily towards networks close to government, the ECF reforms further neutralise and marginalise educational research that might prove uncomfortable for those involved in policy-making. As government is trying to convince the public (and influential international organisations) that it is making progress in reforming education, this greater stipulation of expertise ensures that educational organisations (and teachers) can be made more accountable for implementing the specific practices that are thought to lead to desired improvements. While Education moves increasingly towards the faster lanes of public policy (Eyal, 2019), flawed models of expertise such as those in the ECF reinforce flawed interpretations of the purposes and nuances of educational practice, and this is to the detriment of the prospects of children and young people, and thus also wider society.

7. Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research that underpins this paper was supported by a Society for Educational Studies Small Grant.

Notes

¹ Initial Teacher Education (ITE) in England had not previously been accredited by an external body in this way. Previously the emphasis had been on processes of quality assurance via inspections by the Office for Standards in Education (OfSTED) and (in the case of Higher Education Institutions) additionally via the external examiner system used throughout higher education in the United Kingdom. These processes will continue under the new accreditation regime.

² The six lead providers of the ECF during the first two years of the ECF are Ambition Institute, Teach First, UCL Institute of Education, Best Practice Network, Capita, Education Development Trust (see IES/BMG Research, 2023).

³ The Early Career Framework was first published in 2019 and the Early Career Framework reforms were rolled out nationally from 2021.