How teachers’ engagement with policymaking affects professional identity

NANSI ELLIS, FREELANCE POLICY CONSULTANT, UK

Education policies can strengthen or weaken teacher agency – that is, teachers’ active contribution to shaping their work and their conditions (Priestley et al., 2015) – and teacher agency is key to professional identity. Teacher identity is an ‘important mediating factor in the implementation of educational policies’ (Müller and Cook, 2024, p. 9), and a strong professional identity can be developed through engagement with policymaking.

Policy as a term is used in many ways but often defined differently. This article uses Stephen Ball’s (2017) helpful distinction of ‘big-P policies’ – ‘something constructed within government’ – and ‘little-p policies’, which are ‘formed and enacted within localities and institutions’ (p. 10). In particular, as Ball notes, ‘Policy action is almost always about reform… about rethinking, or “reimagining”, education and what it means to be educated – and this meaning is contested.’ (2017, p. 11) While teachers are often viewed in policy terms as ‘deliverers’ of education, they are also clearly engaged in defining education.

Although it can feel very distant from the classroom, teachers are involved in policymaking. As implementers of government policy, they mediate written policy in their classroom contexts. Working with policies that reflect beliefs about education can strengthen professional identity, while those that go against deeply held values lead teachers to choose reluctant compliance or difficult resistance.

Teachers can also be engaged through policy consultations and calls for evidence, but these can be complex and time-consuming – the Curriculum and Assessment review (DfEDepartment for Education - a ministerial department responsible for children’s services and education in England, 2024a) had 54 questions – or happen so late in the policymaking process that they are more of an opportunity to comment on implementation of policies already decided than a chance to affect real change. The intensity of teacher workload (Green, 2021) has opened the door to a range of initiatives that seek to cut working hours by reducing practices that require professional judgement and agency – for example, by offering scripted lesson plans or prescribing lesson structures. This leads to de-professionalisation.

Teacher professional identity is at the heart of government policy. Policy can both support professional identity and agency – for example, by loosening the prescription of curriculum content – while limiting opportunities to exercise it by increasing accountability measures through high-stakes testing or inspecting (Priestley et al., 2015). In England, policies have increasingly positioned the profession as compliant, competing for resources, striving for efficiency and individually accountable for pupil attainment, progress and wellbeing. The initial teacher trainingAbbreviated to ITT, the period of academic study and time in school leading to Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) and early career framework (DfE, 2024b) and its ‘golden thread’ set out the definition of how to be a teacher, while accountability frameworks define the outcomes to be achieved. Evidence-informed practice can be misused to identify specific evidence and the practice that should develop from that evidence, regardless of context or teacher experience – for example, phonics policy in primary schools, where prescribed practice is backed up with testing, funded resources and teacher training, reducing opportunities for teacher professional judgement and suggesting a lack of trust in teachers’ professional knowledge and expertise. The alignment between the way in which professionalism is defined by policymakers and how it is viewed by the profession has a significant impact on teachers’ feelings of self-efficacy and belonging.

There is no single or ‘best’ collective professional identity; it must be continually negotiated. Many current arguments about policy come from conflicting professional identities and values: behaviour management through restorative practices versus isolation rooms; exams as the ‘fairest and most accurate’ (for example, Gavin Williamson to the Education Select Committee, 2020) versus a broader range of assessment; a ‘knowledge’-led versus a ‘skills’-led curriculum. Our policymaking system encourages these discourses of dichotomy and derision (Alexander, 2019) rather than dialogue.

If policies are to support teacher professionalism, the profession must play a major part in policymaking. Policymaking begins with a need for change and with questions about why and how things could change. In Improving Education Policy Together (Ellis and Conyard, 2024), the four stages of policymaking are underpinned by three ‘elements’, the first of which is ‘involving the right people’ (p. 120). These include the people to whom the issue is important, those who will be part of addressing it, those who need to know about it and those who can evaluate both policy and implementation (Ellis and Conyard, 2024).

Engagement in policymaking is underpinned by the three dimensions of teacher professionalism, as set out by the Chartered College of Teaching (Müller and Cook, 2024). Müller and Cook argue that the cognitive domain of teacher professionalism – and particularly the notion of ‘skill-informed theory’ – is crucial in moving ‘away from a top-down approach to evidence-informed practice’ (2024, p. 12). It is also important for policymaking to move away from a top-down approach. Bringing together both a wide range of evidence and clear skill-informed theory is key to ensuring that policies reflect the realities of the classroom and school context.

The ethical domain of teacher professionalism (Müller and Cook, 2024) engages teachers with what’s best for children and the community. Müller and Cook argue that ‘commitment to the common good sits at the heart of teachers’ motivation to join the profession’ (p. 14), but the requirement to act in students’ best interest can often seem to be at odds with the increasing focus of policy on efficiency and improving narrowly defined outcomes. This conflict can have a major impact on teachers’ professional identity. Increasing poverty, pupils with special educational needs, and declining mental health have all increased teachers’ workload to compensate for underfunded external agencies. These issues are the end result of political decisions that have gone against professional ethical values, leaving a profession too busy plugging gaps for children and their families to find the time to fight for a better system.

The legal and social domain of teacher professionalism (Müller and Cook, 2024) includes consideration of professional standards to maintain quality. Current teacher standards are process-driven and use top-down approaches to measure effectiveness. This domain also includes teacher autonomy. While having the ‘freedom to take the approach [that teachers] regard as most suitable for their contexts’ (Müller and Cook, 2024, p. 16) is important, it proves difficult under the constraints of current policies, particularly those that place teachers as compliant or concerned with efficiency – for example, high-stakes accountability frameworks. Priestley et al. (2015) argue that autonomy is too often perceived as placing the teacher as the only person making decisions, and that a better conception is that of agency. Seen from an ‘ecological’ perspective, agency is achieved within cultures, structures and relationships, and requires policies to consider the factors that shape those and not just policies that improve the capacities of individual teachers.

An actively engaged or, as Sachs (2003) describes it, activist profession should have the autonomy to define its needs, agree priorities and work collaboratively with academics, parents, community and civil servants, to build a better education system together. For policies to be effective, they need to be built from the ground up, based on identified needs of practitioners and pupils, and developed collaboratively. Democratic professionalism involves ‘teachers [bringing] their knowledge in dialogue with the knowledge of “clients” and other professionals’ (Sachs, 2003, p. 8) – teachers are ideally placed to build knowledge in dialogue with others. Policies can then be built through ‘mutual engagement around a joint enterprise’ (Sachs, 2003, p. 16).

For collaborative policymaking to happen, engagement in research and policymaking needs to be part of what teaching is, and not something that a few people do when they find or make time. This may need a change in culture at school level, to offer opportunities for teachers to reflect together not just on their own practice but on the broader purposes of education that underpin that practice. This means that we must rethink professional identity and professional work to encompass it. Sachs’ (2003) view of an activist identity for professionals is ‘rooted in principles of equity and social justice’ and has ‘clear emancipatory aims’ (p. 131). This is activist professionalism, focused on the needs and aspirations of students, families and communities. It is based on John Dewey’s notion of democratic schooling, requiring the participation and inclusionAn approach where a school aims to ensure that all children are educated together, with support for those who require it to access the full curriculum and contribute to and participate in all aspects of school life of all who are involved or affected by decisions made (Sachs, 2003).

There are different ways of doing this. The Department for EducationThe ministerial department responsible for children’s services and education in England sometimes engages teachers or school leaders in its policy working groups, and has previously appointed teacher reference groups to provide expert opinion on policies in formation, although these are still somewhat ‘top-down’. Teacher unions and subject associations have different ways of engaging teachers in both policy critique and solution-building, both formally through union conferences and executive committees and informally through issues-based working groups. There is a place too for local policy development through design thinking and experiments, using skill-informed theory and practice to shape the ways in which policymakers think about issues and their solutions, working with parents and other stakeholders to build new ways of engagement and new knowledge, building networks and collaborating so that diverse and seldom-heard voices are central. This needs the development of self-narratives – stories about what school, pedagogy and education are about. These narratives ‘require an active debate about policy and practice’ (Sachs, 2003, p. 132), a vision for the future and an understanding of how to build coalitions and to engage with politicians and policymakers to get ideas heard. All of this takes trust, and trust takes time.

Teachers’ engagement with policy can have a negative impact on professional identity. But engagement with policymaking that grows from research, shared vision and knowledge of classrooms and community builds a professional identity that is ethical, reflective, autonomous and collective. It enhances agency, self-efficacy and the profession’s status and respect. And it makes policy – and education – better.