Today, the Chartered College of Teaching launched a cross-sector working group on the topic of teacher agency. Teacher agency is an important yet often misinterpreted and overlooked concept. Essentially, it describes teachers’ ability to act, which can be helped or hindered by the system they operate in.

Why teacher agency?

Teacher agency is a crucial topic at a time of ongoing teacher shortages and curriculum reform. Research has repeatedly highlighted an association between teachers’ agency over curriculum implementation and assessment decisions and their job satisfaction, wellbeing and intention to stay in the profession. Having agency over instructional decisions can also help teachers to adapt teaching and assessments to meet the diverse needs of students in their classrooms, which makes it particularly timely given the focus on inclusion in the updated Ofsted Inspection Framework as well as the Curriculum and Assessment Review and the upcoming White Paper.

Agency and autonomy are also core principles of professionalism, which we have discussed in our working definition of professionalism that you can find here. In it, we highlight that teachers and school leaders are not mere implementers of policy decisions but need the professional freedom to adapt recommendations from policy to suit their specific contexts and their students’ needs.

Considering teachers’ agency is a key part of their recognition as professionals and is crucial in a time when teacher recruitment and retention is more challenging than it has ever been. 

Dr Cat Scutt MBE

What’s the problem?

Policy decisions in England have largely been characterised by increased autonomy at the structural/school level (e.g. free schools) but decreasing agency due to centralisation, standardisation and restrictive accountability systems at the individual teacher level (Parker, 2015). 

This is for a number of reasons. Firstly, the belief that standardisation can improve teaching quality by evening out individual differences in teaching approaches. This can be true, especially in the context of substantial policy changes (e.g. introducing a new way of teaching) and/or an under-qualified teaching workforce that needs to be upskilled quickly. However, in England, we are lucky to have a very highly qualified teacher workforce and have been investing a lot in teachers’ initial and continuous professional development over the years. In such a context, higher levels of teacher agency have the potential to improve teaching by allowing teachers to adapt teaching approaches better to their contexts and their students’ needs. It therefore is important to balance the need for guidance with teachers’ needs to adapt teaching to their contexts, based on their professional expertise.

This leads to the second point. Teacher agency is sometimes conflated with autonomy and misconstrued as meaning anyone doing whatever they feel like, which is not the case. As our definition of teacher professionalism highlights, engagement with the relevant research literature, high-quality CPD, including peer learning, and critical reflection are all essential components of professionalism and agency operates within the confines of these concepts.  

We believe that the time is right to have a cross-sector conversation about agency.

Dr Lisa-Maria Müller 

The working group

As the professional body for teachers, we believe that the time is right to have a cross-sector conversation about agency, bringing together practitioners, academics and other organisations to address prevailing misconceptions, highlight why teacher agency matters and provide guidance on how it can be enabled in policy and practice.

The aims of the new working party therefore are to:

• agree a shared definition of teacher agency
• outline the importance of teacher agency for curriculum implementation, inclusion and teacher job satisfaction
• address misconceptions surrounding the concept
• illustrate what teacher agency looks like in practice
• formulate recommendations for how teacher agency can be developed through policy and school leadership.