Conference Agenda

Teachers work in positions of authority and trust. Teaching is complex intellectual work and complex relational work (Buchanan, 2020). Standards and ethics are core to what it means to teach, and teaching is rooted in highly specialist knowledge and skills. These features of the profession have, in many jurisdictions, meant that becoming a teacher is formed through quality professional education in higher education institutes in partnership with assessed school experience and being and growing as a teacher is underpinned by an ongoing commitment to professional learning and personal development.

Communities rightly trust their teachers and the route to becoming, being and growing as a teacher is often supported by a framework of professional standards to guide personal and professional development as well as ensure the maintenance of high standards, the status of teaching and therefore trust in the profession. This framework often starts with guiding entry to the profession, includes mandatory requirements for qualifying as a teacher and maintaining associated registration, and may also include a developmental structure for continuing professional education and development, including expectations for individuals undertaking teacher leader positions.

Frameworks to support teacher professionalism require appropriate checks and balances with the aim of ensuring that those who profess to belong to the teaching profession should. This includes considering how respective agencies and bodies work together in relationships of responsibility to maintain and enhance teacher professionalism and therefore ensure trusted teaching.

There can be a tendency to look out from an existing system to gather information about how other countries maintain their frameworks to ensure trusted teaching. Looking outwards is an important tool for system learning, however there is a need to take full account of the historical, contextual and governance factors implicit in the ‘home’ area to ensure any future change coherently outlines requirements and opportunities for the individual teacher.

This session brings together teaching and education registration and regulation bodies from three UK jurisdictions (Ireland, Scotland and Wales). An overview of each area’s framework for ensuring trusted teaching is provided with key differences, barriers and opportunities highlighted with the aim of exemplifying core features implicit in ensuring a trusted teaching profession. Themes include ethics, values, professional standards, how breaches of trust are managed, trusted system leadership, commitment to ongoing teacher learning and teacher education. The contextual factors implicit in each system in support of registration and regulation will be highlighted to scaffold participants' discussion related to the barriers and levers to the professional status of teachers and therefore the enhancement of trusted teaching for school effectiveness and improvement.

Teachers play a critical role in student learning and school and system improvement (Muijs et al., 2014). Teacher shortages – and other issues relating to compromised teacher capacity, capability, and efficacy – can have long-term, detrimental consequences for educational outcomes and national agendas. While many educational systems are implementing policy and practice reforms that aim to attract, retain, and develop high quality teachers (European Commission/ EACEA/ Eurydice, 2021), research focusing on how human resource policy reforms are designed and enacted within educational system contexts are limited (e.g., Tournier et al., 2019). This Innovate session outlines an approach to whole of system reform, which involves the design of evidence-informed architectures that work in concert to maximise opportunities for teachers to continue to grow professionally and progress their careers in personalised ways, given teaching, specialist, and leadership career tracks. Our session encourages participants to draw upon insights from their own educational contexts to engage in structured collegial discussions on aspects of these interrelated architectures. Our collective interpretive lens for the session will be the OECD’s (2019) conceptual framing that brings together HR policies and staff working environments, individual and collective capacity and capability building, and effective leadership, teaching, and learning (p. 48).

In high-performing systems, “teachers see teaching as a meaningful, rewarding career that demands ongoing development of knowledge and skills” (National Center on Education and the Economy, 2020, p. 12). Alongside robust benchmarking of the mechanisms that such systems use to build a strong teaching profession, our approach to reform involves establishing a deep understanding of the educational system – that is, existing policies, practices, perspectives, and workforce profiles – as well as characteristics of local labour markets and the broader political and sociocultural milieu. Understanding of the educational context and international good practice enables us to work agentically with system leaders and stakeholders to enact policy reforms that generate the very conditions that allow teacher motivation and learning to flourish (Fullan, 2014).

Our team comprises educational and human resource researchers and practitioners, who collaborate on large-scale policy reform projects. Across three presentations, we aim to illuminate design features of key system architectures, including (1) a school classification taxonomy that, in combination with an equitable school funding system, sees teachers and other resources deployed more effectively in schools, (2) a school organisational structure that is responsive to schools’ complexity and needs (3) a multidirectional teacher career progression model and balanced rewards scheme, and (4) a teacher professional appraisal system that articulates with a growth-oriented, career-long competency framework and targeted professional learning and career development opportunities. These interrelated architectures are designed to recognise impactful teachers and leaders, match individuals to responsibilities that align with their competencies and career aspirations, and increase flexibility and pathways, given options within and across tracks and schools of varying complexity. Long-term, it is anticipated that these architectures will support increased teacher competence, learning, motivation, and retention within the system and profession.