Agency is often misinterpreted and overlooked, but giving teachers themselves more capacity to act would bring wide-ranging benefits, writes Lisa-Maria Müller
Teacher agency is an important concept, yet often misinterpreted and overlooked.
The Chartered College of Teaching’s new working group aims to address this.
Teacher agency is pivotal to developing confident, expert practitioners who feel empowered within our profession, as one member of the group, Tracy Goodyear, has said.
Agency is key for wellbeing, recruitment and retention
England continues to face substantial teacher shortages. Many important initiatives across research and policy aim to understand and address the problem.
Yet they fail to address a core issue – the eroding trust in, and status of, the teaching profession.
Being trusted as a professional, and having agency over one’s teaching and professional development, positively impacts 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.
This 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.
Standardisation, centralisation and restrictive accountability
Yet in England, policy decisions have largely been characterised by increased autonomy at the structural or school level – as with the creation of free schools.
This has happened alongside decreasing agency at the individual teacher level, due to centralisation, standardisation and restrictive accountability systems.
Standardisation can be helpful, and accountability is essential.
But these need to leave sufficient freedom for teachers to exercise their professional judgment – based on a combination of their professional expertise, the latest available evidence and knowledge of their contexts and students.
Essentially, teacher agency describes teachers’ ability to act, which can be helped or hindered by the system they operate in.
Teachers need agency over CPD
We know that using evidence is key to improving teaching.
For research to truly inform practice, teachers must actively understand, interpret and apply evidence in their different classrooms and contexts, as well as analysing and reflecting on the outcomes. This requires agency to make choices over practice.
Teachers also need agency over their continuing professional development (CPD) so that they can adapt it to suit their needs.
While whole-school CPD has its place, approaches that allow teachers to focus on areas of particular importance to them can positively impact their motivation to stay in the profession.
Teacher agency is not static. It emerges and evolves according to different contexts, and in relation to teachers’ experience and expertise.
Too much agency too early on may be overwhelming, and may actually be counterproductive.
For teachers to exercise agency, they need to be adequately supported. Our working group will draw out what that could look like.
We will show why agency matters and what it looks like
The new group brings together practitioners, academics and other key organisations.
We have already started work to develop a shared definition of teacher agency – which is no mean feat – and address prevailing misconceptions.
We aim to highlight why teacher agency matters for curriculum implementation, inclusion and job satisfaction.
We aim to illustrate what it looks like in practice, and show how policy-makers and school leaders can support it.
As Lekha Sharma, another member of the working group, puts it – we will develop a clear focus on teacher agency, and explore practical ways schools can actively foster it, creating supportive cultures of continuous improvement.
You can find out more about the group’s aims and members on The Chartered College of Teaching’s website.
We will be publishing regular updates in a blog series, and sharing insights from the discussions on social media.
So make sure to follow The Chartered College of Teaching on LinkedIn and BlueSky, and let us know what you think.
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