Education Informatics as a Discipline for Equitable, Evidence-Informed and Sovereign Digital Education Systems: A Critical Conceptual Review

Education systems are increasingly shaped by decisions about infrastructure, interoperability, data governance, procurement, and artificial intelligence, yet no established field treats these decisions as a single object of professional responsibility. This article asks whether Education Informatics can be specified as a distinct interface discipline, analogous to Business Informatics and Engineering Informatics. It is a critical conceptual review addressing four review questions; its search is documented using the PRISMA-ScR reporting items for transparency, without claiming scoping-review status. From Scopus and Web of Science, 1839 records were screened at title and abstract levels and analysed by framework synthesis against five adjacent fields. Four findings are reported, one per question. The term is in circulation but lacks a stable referent, definitional core, and citation community (RQ1). Procurement appears in under two per cent of records in every adjacent field, and only eleven of 785 education-relevant records integrate governance, architecture, and pedagogy (RQ2). The traditions able to ground the field are diagnostic rather than constructive (RQ3). No empirical study evaluates the institutional outcomes of interface-discipline formation (RQ4). Education Informatics is therefore advanced constitutively rather than descriptively: its object, theoretical foundations, competency profile, and three institutionalisation pathways are specified as claims to be tested.