The futures of teaching

Posted on 18/02/2026

Will the work of teaching become increasingly standardised as an individual teacher’s agency is further constrained? Or, PATRICK YARKER wonders, can teachers reclaim the creative, imaginative and critical dimensions of their work, and with it their responsible autonomy?

In an education system whose armature is high-stakes public testing, teachers undergo continual monitoring and record-checking to prove they have adhered to curricula directives which they have had little if any hand in compiling. More and more, teachers must follow standardised curricula, and, as a recent NEU report makes plain, the detail of the way they teach is increasingly being mandated. Some teachers, perhaps many, are micro-managed to such a degree that they can’t even choose what to put on the walls of their classroom, let alone decide how to arrange its desks and chairs. The way the work of teachers is framed can appear, in the worst cases, akin to coercive control.

Jane Perryman, with others, has researched the long-standing teacher recruitment and retention crisis. Her work lays bare how a policy stance which ousts trust in favour of accountability corrodes teachers’ commitment. This policy is arguably the most important element in the nexus of factors which push a teacher out of the profession. New teachers accept that their working day will be long and hard. It is not that burden in itself which so rapidly destroys their commitment. They joined the profession, research suggests, to serve society or give back to it, to make a beneficial difference in the lives of young people, and to inspire passion for a subject or for learning generally. These motives are of a piece with the Deweyan notion of teaching as a continuation of the good of society; a handing-on of its better aspects. What disenchants teachers is the super-scrutiny they must undergo, and the relentlessly constraining deprofessionalisation that characterises the way their work is framed in too many schools. Those who have left the profession report a ‘loss of self’ in the job: a thwarting of their teacher identity by the current system. They were prevented from being the teacher they wanted to be and had it in them to be. Instead of trust in their judgement, support to extend, deepen and enrich it, and scope to employ it, they met with the soul-sapping mechanisms of performativity imposed at the behest of a version of teaching tilted far too far towards the technicist and instrumental.

It is this trend towards bare functionalism in the way teaching is framed, and hence how policy sees teachers, which chiefly undermines their commitment and intensifies the recruitment and retention crisis.

Virtual

The trend has a dystopian dynamic. One potential consequence is a break with the idea that teaching should be seen as a relationship between people who share the same space. The belief that, to teach properly, you must physically be with the person(s) you are teaching. That the art of teaching is informed by the body as well as the mind: importantly felt, not simply thought.

The Star Academy Trust has attempted to make this break. Unable, it seems, to recruit a specialist maths teacher for one of its schools, it had recourse to a ‘virtual’ teacher to take certain year 9-11 maths classes. The teacher could be seen and heard from several hundred miles away via a screen.

Teachers at the school went on strike for three days in December 2025 to oppose this logical extension of the currently dominant way of regarding teachers and their role, and one which undermines what good teaching entails and requires. The National Education Union (NEU) general secretary, Daniel Kebede, stood on the picket line. Following the strike, Star Academy Trust agreed to end the ‘virtual’ teacher experiment by or before the end of this academic year.

A public matter

In his book The Future of Teaching, Guy Claxton advocates for pedagogy to become a public matter, much as curriculum and assessment are already publicly debated. He argues that what he calls its ‘learning culture’ is too important to be determined solely by individual schools or trusts. He is prompted in this by the extent to which a particular kind of pedagogic approach, which he terms ‘direct instruction/knowledge rich’, perpetuates to a harmful degree half-truths, myths and falsehoods about teaching and learning. He exposes this harm and offers a corrective to the wrong thinking responsible for it. Claxton wants teaching to be far more mindful of the challenges which the generations now rising through school are likely to face. He wants ‘teaching for the future’.

How might this be squared with the Deweyan view that education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living, and that since we cannot be sure how our society will appear 20 years from now, what is needed most of all is flexibility of curriculum and pedagogy that enables young people to have full and ready use of all their capacities?

FORUM’s sumer number will hope to address these issues. Called ‘The futures of teaching’, it will carry articles from beyond the UK as well (I hope) as from this country. How should teachers meet the continuing advance of digital technologies and ‘virtuality’? What purposes should principally inform, motivate or guide the teacher, and how can teachers work to ensure they have more of a voice in all matters of education? What should be the relationship between schools and communities, young people and school systems? How can we escape the colonial and class-based logics that have structured how we prepare teachers and how they are permitted to teach? How can we overcome the challenges currently faced by teachers and by schools to imagine new futures for teachers and teaching? What is being done in schools or classrooms even now that holds out the prospect of a happier and more fulfilling way of working in school?

If you would like to contribute to this Special Issue, please get in touch.

Patrick Yarker