Scarcely visible? Analysing initial teacher education research and the Research Excellence Framework

In the UK, the Research Excellence Framework is a mechanism used for ranking the quality of research in higher education institutions. While there has been analysis of the entire Research Excellence Framework, and of the Education unit of assessment more generally, analysis of how research on initial teacher education featured in the Research Excellence Framework has been minimal. In this article, we report on Phase I of an 18-month project that mapped the extent to which initial teacher education-focused research was included in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework. Employing a novel methodology and a theoretical framework based on policy as text and discourse, we identify a sample of 12 higher education institutions that provided initial teacher education programmes and returned outputs to the 2014 Research Excellence Framework. Analysis of over 1,600 outputs suggest that in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework only 5.5 per cent of these were focused on initial teacher education. We discuss the methodological approach, some headline findings and areas for future research, arguing that these add evidence to the literature of initial teacher education-focused research and, in doing so, can inform policy at the levels of schools, higher education institutions, Research Excellence Framework and the government. We conclude that although the Research Excellence Framework only concerns the UK, similar exercises are becoming increasingly prevalent globally, and therefore the extent to which research on initial teacher education was marginalised in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework is of interest to all concerned with teacher education.