By Matt Bromley
Teaching isn’t just a job, it’s a profession.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines a profession as “any type of work that needs special training or a particular skill, often one that is respected because it involves a high level of education”.
A professional, meanwhile, is defined as “having the qualities that you connect with trained and skilled people, such as effectiveness, skill, organisation, and seriousness of manner”.
We tend to regard teaching – along with law, medicine, and accountancy – as a profession, because teachers must:
- Have a post-graduate professional qualification
- Answer to a professional body
- Comply with statutory obligations
- Uphold a set of professional standards
- Engage in ongoing professional development
- Take collective responsibility for their profession
Let’s explore these six aspects of being a teaching professional in turn…
What it means to be a professional
On the first point, qualified teacher status or QTS, is a legal requirement to teach in many schools in the UK and is desirable for all schools. You need a bachelor’s degree to teach in primary, secondary and special schools. If you have a degree, you can do a postgraduate teacher training qualification to get QTS. These usually take 9 months to complete. If you don’t have a degree, you can train to be a teacher as part of your bachelor’s degree. Full time degree courses that lead to QTS can take up to 4 years to complete.
On the second point, the Teaching Regulatory Agency (TRA) is responsible for awarding QTS and oversees the regulation for the profession including misconduct hearings and the maintenance of teacher records. A teacher who is found guilty of misconduct can be ‘struck off’ by the TRA and barred from teaching.
On the third point, teachers are bound by many legal duties and obligations including those pertaining to safeguarding and child protection. Teachers are required to do all that is reasonable to protect the health, safety and welfare of pupils. A teacher’s legal responsibilities derive from three sources:
- the common law duty of care
- the statutory duty of care
- the duty arising from a contract of employment
The ‘common law’ is law developed through decisions of the Court as opposed to law which has been determined by Parliament and set down in statute.
Teachers are also responsible under the Children Act 2004 which places statutory duties upon those who care for children. Section 11 of the Children Act 2004 requires teachers to have regard to the need to safeguard and promote the welfare of children when carrying out their work.
A teacher’s duty of care also arises from their contract of employment, the terms of which will depend on the type of school in which they work and their role.
On the fourth point, teachers in primary, secondary and special schools in England are also required to uphold the Teachers’ Standards (those working in post-16 settings are bound by the ETF Professional Standards). The Teachers’ Standards define the minimum level of practice expected of trainees and teachers from the point of being awarded QTS. But the standards are also important for ECTs because they are used to assess all trainees working towards QTS, and all those completing their statutory induction period.
The standards are divided into:
- Teaching
- Personal and professional conduct
One of the standards requires teachers to “uphold public trust in the profession and maintain high standards of ethics and behaviour, within and outside school” which brings me to another important distinction between a professional and non-professional: professionals like teachers must always act within the statutory frameworks which set out their professional duties and responsibilities, not just when they are ‘at work’. In other words, a teacher is never ‘off duty’; rather, they must uphold high standards of professional conduct at all times.
On the fifth point, teachers must not allow their professional knowledge and skills to decay or outdate. They must commit to continuing professional development throughout their careers to build upon their knowledge and keep it up to date and relevant as the tectonic plates of educational research and policy shift beneath their feet.
Partaking in CPD is not optional; it is a mandatory aspect of being a teacher. What’s more, teacher CPD should develop subject knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge – helping teachers to become and remain dual professionals.
Teacher CPD must also lead to changes in daily practice and thus must be evaluated to measure its impact. The best CPD takes myriad forms and balances external expertise (conferences, training courses, reading materials, etc) with internal peer-to-peer support (teacher-led training, peer-observations, co-planning and teaching, etc).
The sixth and final point is that teachers must take collective responsibility. Collective responsibility is, in fact, about both responsibility and accountability. Responsibility is taking ownership of the completion of a task whereas accountability is taking ownership of what happens next.
So, what does this mean to early career teachers joining the teaching profession?
What it means to be part of a profession
Teachers often make the mistake of thinking that, as qualified professionals, they are autonomous, afforded the freedom to work in isolation without interference from others. However, there is a difference between individual autonomy – which is a form of isolationism – and professional autonomy – which is about working within a framework and taking collective responsibility for your actions and the results of those actions.
Vivianne Robinson, in her book Student-Centred Leadership[1], argues that, although “feet of varying shapes should not be shoved into the same ill-fitting shoe”, in the sense of professional practice – teaching and teacher-learning – one size does fit all. In other words, although it is assumed that any loss of autonomy is undesirable because it somehow reduces the professionalism of teachers, this isn’t necessarily the case…
Although there is no question that increased coherence means reduced individual freedom, it does not necessarily imply decreased professionalism. Doctors are seen as professionals because they have mastered complex sets of shared diagnostic and treatment practices. They exercise their judgment about how those procedures are to be applied in any individual case and are held accountable for those judgments.
Teachers need sufficient freedom to exercise their professional judgment about how to use the framework and to contribute to evaluative discussions about its adequacy. But that autonomy should also be constrained by the need to ensure effective teaching practice – that is, practice under which all learners achieve to a high level.
Standard professional practice provides the scaffolding that’s required for the exercise of truly professional rather than idiosyncratic judgment. In other words, although, as professionals, we don’t want to eradicate our individuality, we do want to avoid individualism (habitual or enforced patterns of working alone). Eliminating individualism should not be about making everyone the same and plunging them into groupthink; it should be about achieving collective responsibility and accountability.
Being a professional is about what you do and how you behave. In their book, Professional Capital[2], Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan say that being a professional is about “being impartial and upholding high standards of conduct and performance. Being professional is about quality and character.” Being a professional, they say, has more to do with how other people regard you, and how this affects the regard you have for yourself. Moreover, being a professional means having collective – rather than individual – autonomy.
In his book, Good to Great[3], Jim Collins expounds the importance of having a set of consistent systems and structures which dictate what staff can and cannot do and which governs how they should and should not operate.
Collins uses the analogy of an airline pilot. A pilot, he says, operates within a very strict system and does not have the freedom to go outside of that system. Yet at the same time, the crucial decisions – whether to take off, whether to land, whether to abort, whether to land elsewhere – rest with the pilot.
What this means in practice
Being a professional, then, means working within the scaffold of standard practice, assuming collective rather than individual autonomy; being a member of a profession rather than being idiosyncratic. It requires the building of a shared culture – a culture of high trust and low threat; a no-blame culture.
As an ECT, you will need to understand the frameworks and standard practices at play in your school, as well as in the wider education sector, and work as part of the collective. This involves understanding and following school policies.
Schools are required by law to have about 30 policies, but your school is likely to have more than that in practice. It’s not possible to immerse yourself in the detail of every one of these documents, and some will not apply to you as an ECT, but I’d suggest you quickly get to know what’s in the key school policies that do affect your daily practice.
This is likely to include the early career teachers policy, the staff discipline policy, the child protection and safeguarding policy, the behaviour policy, the SEND policy, the assessment policy, etc.
I’d also suggest you familiarise yourself with some key national policies and guidance that impact you including Keeping Children Safe in Education, the SEND Code of Practice, and the Equality Act 2010: Advice for Schools.
As an ECT, I’d further suggest you fully engage in professional networks, both in your school and beyond it. Work closely with your subject team on collaborative planning and standardisation. Work with other ECTs in your school on your induction. Work with pastoral colleagues to understand your role as a form tutor. Work with admin staff to understand your school’s systems and procedures, including for taking registers, inputting assessment data, communicating with parents, completing reports, etc. Work with key postholders such as the SENDCo and Pupil Premium Coordinator to understand your role in meeting pupils’ individual needs. And become an active member of the staff room, informally connecting with colleagues to share good practice and find out more about your school’s ways of working, as well as socialising in order to promote good health and wellbeing.
Outside of school, I’d suggest you become a member of a subject association as well as join a teaching union. If you work in a multiple academy trust or active local authority, I’d suggest you take part in ECT and subject networks to access support from across the trust or district, learning what works in different schools.
As an ECT, then, what you need is to become a part of what John Hattie in Visible Learning for Teachers[4]calls a “community of teachers … to work together to ask questions, evaluate their impact, and decide on the optimal next steps”.
Hattie begins that book with a medical analogy and refers to the doctors he’s witnessed first-hand “following scripts” and working with set procedures: “Throughout the treatment, the impact of [doctors’] interventions was monitored, changed, and led to the critical decisions”.
“Teams [of doctors] worked to understand the consequences of treatments and evidence was the key to adaptive professional decision-making – all aiming to maximise the impact.”
And that is key to being a successful member of the teaching profession: know thy impact!
References
[1] Robinson, V (2011). Student-Centred Leadership. Jossey-Bass.
[2] Hargreaves, A & Fullan, M (2012). Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School. Routledge.
[3] Collins, J (2001). Good to Great: Why some companies make the leap and others don’t. Random House Business.
[4] Hattie, J (2012). Visible Learning for Teachers. Routledge.
About the author
Matt Bromley is CEO of bee. He is an education journalist, author, and advisor with twenty five years’ experience in teaching and leadership including as a secondary school headteacher and academy principal, further education college vice principal, and multi-academy trust director.
Matt is a public speaker, trainer, initial teacher training lecturer, and school improvement advisor. He remains a practising teacher, currently working in secondary, FE and HE settings.
Matt writes for various magazines, is the author of numerous best-selling books on education, and co-hosts an award-winning podcast.
Find out more here. Follow Matt on X @mj_bromley
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