Conference Agenda

Teacher agency has become a central concept in contemporary educational research and policy discourse, frequently framed as a key resource for innovation, professionalism, and democratic school development (Priestley, Biesta, & Robinson, 2015). Within this dominant framing, agency is often treated as inherently positive and normatively desirable. This proposal challenges that assumption by arguing that teacher agency is not automatically democratic. Under specific governance conditions, professionally strong forms of agency may become ambivalent, simultaneously enabling action while undermining collegiality, shared professional judgement, and democratic practices within schools.

The paper is theoretically driven and builds on empirical material analysed and presented across several peer-reviewed journal articles. Rather than introducing new data, the contribution offers a conceptual re-reading of existing empirical work in order to foreground a dimension that has so far remained under-theorised in agency research: the tension between teacher agency, neoliberal governance, and democracy in everyday school life.

The paper addresses the following research questions:

1. How does teacher agency become ambivalent under neoliberal governance conditions?

2. In what ways can professionally strong forms of agency undermine collegiality and democratic practices within schools?

The theoretical framework is anchored in the ecological model of teacher agency (Priestley et al., 2015), which conceptualises agency as a temporally embedded and contextually mediated practice shaped across iterational, projective, and practical-evaluative dimensions. This model provides a foundation for moving beyond individualistic understandings of agency by situating professional action within institutional, cultural, and policy contexts. The paper extends this framework through engagement with critical scholarship on neoliberal education governance, which highlights how decentralisation, accountability, and performativity redistribute responsibility while weakening collective and democratic structures (Ball, 2003; Goodson & Rudd, 2017; Sahlberg, 2018).

Within such governance regimes, teachers are increasingly positioned as individually responsible actors expected to demonstrate initiative, flexibility, and continuous self-improvement. While these expectations appear to expand professional autonomy, the empirical material reveals a more paradoxical dynamic. Teachers with strong professional competence and commitment often assume extensive responsibility not only for classroom practice, but also for institutional performance and social problems that exceed their professional mandate. This redistribution of responsibility, combined with reduced collective deliberative spaces, generates ambivalent agency—a form of agency that sustains professional action while simultaneously reinforcing isolation, competition, and normative pressure.

A central argument of the paper is that these dynamics have profound implications for democracy in schools. Democratic school cultures rely on collegial trust, shared professional judgement, and collective responsibility. However, the analysis suggests that ambivalent agency may erode these conditions by privileging individual performance, visibility, and compliance over collective deliberation. In earlier work, related dynamics have been conceptualised as toxic agency, referring to agentic action that internalises and reproduces system-level pressures at the expense of professional solidarity (Tinn & Ümarik, 2022).

The paper further foregrounds the temporal dimension of ambivalent agency. Teachers’ agentic orientations are shaped by professional biographies and nostalgic narratives of earlier periods perceived as more collegial and democratically grounded (Ümarik & Goodson, 2018; Tinn & Ümarik, 2022). While nostalgia can function as a critical resource for evaluating present reforms and maintaining professional identity, it may also narrow future imaginaries and reinforce defensive or individualised forms of agency, complicating democratic renewal in schools.

By conceptualising teacher agency as ambivalent rather than inherently emancipatory, the paper contributes to international debates on teacher professionalism, educational governance, and the fragile relationship between agency and democracy in contemporary education systems.

In England and other education systems worldwide, school exclusion – including fixed-term suspension and permanent exclusion (expulsion) – has become a commonly used behaviour management tool. Recent evidence suggests that such practices disproportionately affect vulnerable and marginalised groups of children, including children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), children who have a social worker or are in care, children living in poverty, and children from particular ethnic minority backgrounds (Timpson, 2019). Evidence has also identified negative individual and societal costs and consequences linked to school exclusion, including heightened risk of being involved in serious violence (Cornish and Brennan 2025), and having poorer academic, health, and employment outcomes (Timpson 2019; Madia et al. 2022; Obsuth et al. 2024).

Adopting a critical policy analysis approach informed by both Bacchi (2009) and Stone’s (2012) work on problem representation, policy instrumentalization, and policy paradox, this paper examines what ‘problem’ school exclusion is understood to be solving and asks why England has persisted to legalise the use of school exclusionary practices for four decades despite a strong body of evidence indicating that such practices are not effective in preventing and responding to unwanted student behaviours and are linked to negative individual and societal consequences (e.g., Noltemeyer et al., 2015; Wang et al., 2022).

From a critical perspective, we argue that policy legitimacy does not depend on causal effectiveness alone but depends on symbolic value and political interests. In the paper, we outline three policy framings that have been used to legitimise the use of school exclusion since the first governing statutory provision was introduced in England in 1986: (1) School exclusion as a tool to raise standards in schools; (2) School exclusion as a tool to maintain social order; (3) School exclusion as a tool to tackle teacher retention and recruitment problems, and the political interests these framings serve.

We argue that each of these framings are linked with broader political agendas and ideologies, market incentives (e.g., accountability and performance), and apparent 'crises' and media-fed fears around declining standards in schools, the prevalence of violence amongst young people and anti-social behaviour, and declining numbers of teachers entering and staying in the profession. We identify how each of these framings work to individualise behavioural problems and emphasise protection of the majority.

By foregrounding the symbolic and political functions of school exclusion policy, the paper contributes to international debates on governance, equity, and disciplinary policy in contexts where school exclusion remains a sanctioned but increasingly contested policy instrument.

The aim of this British academy-funded research is to examine the impact of law on education governance. The project seeks to answer the question: In what ways and to what extent does law influence the governing of schools, at both institutional and professional level? We seek to identify how school governance is increasingly shaped and influenced by law via legislation and legal discourse and how this is manifested in a range of institutional and professional practices. The study is placed in the context of broader studies of juridification in education and public policy internationally (Carlbaum et al, 2025; González et al, 2025; Karseth and Møller, 2020; Murphy, 2022; Novak, 2019), a trend that researchers have indicated can have both positive and negative consequences for schooling quality and equitable outcomes. Using Scotland as a case study, the study surveys school staff at selected schools in order to better understand how law influences school policies and professional practices. The study will use the findings to identify implications for future integration of law in schools as well as to highlight consequences for equity-driven education policy.

Of special interest is the impact of law on school governance at the institutional level, as well as the ways in which it influences professional practice and relations with students and parents. More broadly we are interested in the contribution law is making to struggles over educational and social justice and the intersection between legal and educational practices. These include how school policies are constructed around issues such as special educational needs, students with disabilities, protected characteristics (such as race, gender, sexuality), anti-bullying strategies and child safeguarding. Our focus also includes more pedagogical issues relating to teaching delivery, curriculum and assessment, as well as the ways in which teaching staff relate and interact with their students. This ‘mapping’ of the presence of law and legal discourse in schools is accompanied by a study of how schools and professionals engage with this presence and how it impacts their practices.

This work is significant as countries such as the United Kingdom are experiencing an increased impact of law on education governance (Furedi and Bristow, 2012; Murphy and Skillen, 2018), a process known as juridification (Teubner, 1998). Key legislation, including the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010 have extended the grounds on which aspects of educational governance and practice can be challenged in court, as well as introducing substantial compliance burdens on schools. In Scotland, attempts at incorporating the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child are ongoing, a process which would provide new legal duties on schools. Few areas of educational practice exist free of legal regulation: the Department for Education’s (DfE’s) statutory guidance to schools, for example, extends to admissions, behaviour, curriculum, governance, looked after children, special educational needs and disability, safeguarding and staff employment (Department for Education, 2025).

The increased prominence of juridification in the education sector suggests that it is time that the role and impact of law is taken more seriously in studies of educational governance. The expanding role of law can be witnessed across numerous other sectors (Magnussen and Nilssen 2013: 233). Although it has received intense interest in the 21st century, an interest in juridification and the social impact of law has been longstanding, with its limitations and potential to negatively impact social relations being the main focus of concern. Juridification is widely cast as a trend with significant limitations when it comes to effective and prudent governance and the capacity of front-line professionals to exercise authority and discretion in their working lives.