(Artwork is a collaborative piece produced by members of the BEING MORTAL art group.)

As an aspirant retiree, I am increasingly heartened to see young people committing themselves to public service. This includes a wide range of professions although, as ever, I am especially interested in teachers.

With every crisis that hits the news we are reminded by various pundits of how professionals and public servants could have done better. Invariably, there are accusations of incompetence or a lack of care. The relationship between these two is problematic.

In the late 1980s, I visited the Cambridge Institute of Education in Cambridge to hear a lecture by John Elliott. Having been introduced as the father of action research, John approached the lectern and said that he had written a paper that he would like to read to us. He cleared his throat and put on his reading glasses but then lowered them again to make some preliminary off-the-cuff remarks. He said that he was worried about all the talk he was hearing about professional competences. He posed a question for us: what is required for driving from A to B without running someone over? There were a few suggestions like the ability to steer accurately and being alert to hazards such as people straying into the road. Then John put us right. The most important factor is the moral one. He hoped that we would all agree that it is morally wrong to run people over, which is why we try really hard to drive in such a way as to avoid that.

Elliott’s party trick was informed by his work on professionalism in the context of police training in several countries and its implications for initial teacher.  He provided an account of this in an article in 1991.

From the perspective of the ‘reflective practitioner’ model, professional competence consists of the ability to act intelligently in situations which are sufficiently novel and unique to require what constitutes an appropriate response to be learned in situ. Competence cannot be defined simply in terms of an ability to apply pre-ordained categories of specialist knowledge to produce correct behavioural responses.

Elliott, 1991: 312

Critiques such as this did little to head off the momentum of the competency movement which continued to generate a series of official specifications throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The government initially embraced the idea of competency by drawing up lists of what new teachers should know and be able to do. Subsequently, we were given a range of so-called ‘professional standards’ which are still used. Perhaps it is not surprising that matters of values and moral purpose were avoided.

A couple of years later the moral question came up when I read a paper by Michael Fullan, Why Teachers Must Become Change Agents in which he said this:

Teaching at its core is a moral profession. Scratch a good teacher and you will find a moral purpose.

Fullan, 1993

The term ‘moral purpose’ refers to our values and the commitment to serve the needs and interests of the children and families we encounter in schools. Specifications of what we need to know and be able to do may be useful – an aid to reflection and discussion – but they are no substitute for the capacity to make judgements based a strong sense of moral purpose and clear pedagogical principles. This has been at the core of my work for decades and I continue to try to persuade policy makers, school leaders and teachers that mobilising moral purpose is the most important thing to do.

The realisation of moral purpose

I have recently uploaded a video presentation in which I discuss the implication of having a strong sense of moral purpose. I argue that, if you want to realise your moral purpose in practice, you need to do two things.

The first thing is that you will need to commit to continuous improvement of your own practice through self-directed inquiry and innovation. In my experience, many teachers are happy to embrace this whole heartedly but there are limitations. If the improvements in practice and the attendant knowledge remain locked into the individual’s classroom and mind, they are likely to evaporate when the teacher moves to another post or takes on a different area of responsibility. For the improved or new practice to be sustained, it has to become embedded in the routines of the school – to become normal practice.  The way to achieve this is through collaboration. This is where the second thing comes in.

To realise your moral purpose in practice, you also need to exercise leadership to initiate a collaborative process, working with colleagues so the innovations new emerging are shared and embedded in the school’s routines. This is more challenging than just developing your own practice. Many teachers still understand leadership is decision-making on the part of those in authority and issuing instructions to members of staff. Our argument in Teachers and the Practice of Leadership (Frost et al., 2026) is that leadership is a practice which entails behaviours such as taking the initiative, offering support / service, provoking reflection and discussion, persuading others to participate and much more. Some may assume that it is somehow inappropriate or impertinent for a teacher to do such things because they don’t have the authority to approach colleagues. In my experience, teachers usually need some encouragement to enact leadership behaviours. Within an NPTL (non-positional teacher leadership) support group, they can benefit from discussions about how such transactions work. For example, a member of the group shared their experience of approaching a colleague by saying:

I wonder if I might ask you for advice. I am worried because there is a small group of kids in my class who can’t seem to do the written tasks I set them. I have tried all the obvious strategies, but nothing seems to make a difference. It makes me feel useless. Have you any idea what I could do?

She told the group that her colleague responded with recognition because she too faced this sort of problem. They agreed to get together to discuss the topic more fully and try to figure out the issues and how they could work together on possible solutions.

Good leadership

Conversations such as the one indicated above are essential to good leadership. The teacher’s aim in this case was to draw her colleagues into a collaborative process that could lead to change. It is naïve to assume that this could simply be achieved by someone with authority telling teachers that they must address the issue as indicated by test data. Although the example is drawn from a scenario in which the idea of non-positional teacher leadership has already been embraced, there is a lesson about leadership more widely. It is applicable whether or not the individual has the authority that might be supposed to come with a formal role of responsibility.

The argument referred to above calls for a particular conception of teacher professionality. In Teachers and the Practice of Leadership, we argue that identities are constructed and the process of identification involves choices. The evidence we have collected over many years shows that, with the support of an NPTL programme, teachers can develop what can be called extended professionality in which they are guided by their moral purpose, pedagogical principles and an inquiry-based search for solutions to their professional concerns. For reasons stated above, such teachers tend to become increasingly committed to exercising leadership in pursuit of the fullest possible realisation of their moral purpose.