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The Prevent policy was singular and ‘simple’: to prevent individuals from getting drawn into terrorism, to identify and stop this process before it begins. In the context of the global war on terror and the shadow of terrorist attacks in the United States and England, this was an increasingly growing issue within the media and the broader public discourse. A central institution charged with enacting Prevent in the United Kingdom were education institutions (schools, colleges and universities), the rationale being that these places of learning house individuals during impressionable and vulnerable times and the Prevent policy can protect these individuals.

This chapter will provide an alternative critical discussion on Prevent by framing it as the securitisation of the UK education sector. As such, Prevent is a form of surveillance and a mechanism of power over educators and learners which carry counterproductive consequences for both. In doing so, this chapter will question how education professionals balance their professional identity and their new role in supporting and enacting the Prevent duty. Through developing a new multi-level ‘Critical Realist World Systems Model’, this chapter will provide a conceptual discussion of Prevent policy more broadly and how education professionals navigate the friction between their professional values and legal obligations. This chapter draws on a range of theoretical traditions to begin to question a well-established security policy within English and Welsh educational institutions providing a conceptual starting point to examine similar and future policies.

Widespread support exists for the view that teaching is a complex task (Schulman, 2004), that learning is a complex, dynamic phenomenon and that classrooms are ‘complex systems’ (Hardman, 2010). Systems behaving in complex, emergent ways cannot be successfully ‘managed’ by rigid, scripted practices but demand flexibility, responsiveness and in situ judgement. However, these dispositions appear only fleetingly, if at all, on professional standards rubrics and statutory descriptors of effective teaching. Discretionary judgement is implied but rarely emphasised. Drawing on the first author's doctoral study of ‘emergent learning’ in a primary school classroom, we demonstrate the importance of pre- and in-service teachers developing expert in-the-moment professional judgement to navigate the emergent and complex nature of classroom learning and argue that professional judgement should enjoy a more prominent, less tacit, position in pre-service initial teacher education (ITE) and in-service Continuing Professional Development (CPD). This chapter briefly describes and presents findings from the doctoral research which focused on how learning emerges bottom-up through classroom interactions, discusses the implications of this for teachers and concludes by setting an agenda for future research into teachers' experiences of agency and autonomy.

This chapter outlines research conducted by Karan Vickers-Hulse (KVH) as part of an educational professional doctorate; Marcus Witt (MW) was one of her supervisory team. Participants were from two initial teacher education (ITE) routes (School Direct and university-led) leading to a PGCE primary teacher qualification. The research was set within the context of continuously evolving policy on the training of teachers and the subsequent impact on developing a professional identity. The introduction of new ITE routes in England (DfE, 2015) aimed to offer a wider range of pathways into teaching, attract more applicants and mitigate the impact of teacher shortages. The research discussed in this chapter explored the experiences of trainees on these routes and the impact on their professional identity formation. This chapter begins with an overview of the literature in the field of professional identity formation, followed by a discussion of the chosen methodology and methods. This chapter concludes with several recommendations for teacher training providers as well as recommendations for future research that may be useful for doctoral students interested in the field of professional identity formation.

This chapter provides an illustration of doctoral case study research and insights to how practitioner research can capture the localised impact of policy shifts.

This chapter is about primary and secondary school teachers of history in England, and how they negotiate policy in order to teach sensitive and controversial issues which feature as part of the history curriculum. We present research conducted in two phases that used a bounded case study (Stake, 1995) as a methodological approach. In Phase One, two focus group interviews were undertaken; in Phase Two, six unstructured individual interviews were conducted. Participants were teachers of history in England from Key Stage 1–5 (children aged 4–18 years).

Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data which were informed by reflections on positionality and being a socially conscious researcher (Pillow, 2010). Three key policies were explored as part of this research: the National Curriculum (DfE, 2013), the Teachers' Standards (DfE, 2012) and the Prevent Duty (DfE, 2015). Research findings demonstrate how the context of the school is fundamental in how teachers enact policy in relation to their practice, particularly in light of political changes in society. Self-surveillance was identified as a key strategy, adopted in the teaching of sensitive and controversial issues. We frame this context around Kitson and McCully's (2005) theoretical continuum which indicates that there is a reluctance by some teachers to engage with the teaching of sensitive and controversial issues due to concerns with policy enactment.

The findings of this research illustrate that policy impacts on teachers in numerous ways. Policy was demonstrated to be ambiguous for teachers, and recommendations are made relating to policy and the need for clearer guidance for teachers to support them with their practice.

Diversifying the teaching profession has been of international concern for several decades. While most attention has been devoted to issues of ‘race’ and ethnicity, in comparison, social class has been relatively invisible. Research suggests that those from working class backgrounds experience challenges with regard to belonging in what has been regarded as a middle class teaching profession. An area unexplored has been the complexities of researching with student teachers from under-represented groups, including those from working class backgrounds. This chapter draws on research conducted as part of the Access to Post-primary Teaching (APT) project funded under the Higher Education Authority's Programme for Access to Higher Education (PATH): Strand 1 – Equity of Access to Initial Teacher Education. APT supports the participation of student teachers from lower socio-economic groups in initial teacher education. Following the introduction and literature review, we provide information about the methodology of the overall project, as well as the data upon which we draw in this chapter. Next, we present a critical reflective analysis of working with APT participants over the last six years, drawing on our own critical reflections as researchers, as well as the voices of our participants through the project's research strand. Here we highlight concerns pertaining to relative researcher-participant positionality, and issues of identity and disclosure. Finally, we interrogate our analysis using the methodological literature about researching with marginalised groups and end with recommendations for supporting researcher reflexivity.

This chapter discusses what the working practices and professionalism of sports lecturers can tell us about the challenges of professionalism in further education (FE). This chapter draws on Jake's doctoral research in which he interviewed five sports lecturers working in FE colleges in England, about their identities and practices. In this chapter, Jake talks about his own experiences as a sports lecturer in FE and how his increasing disillusionment with his role led him to undertake doctoral research in this field. We explore constructions of professionalism within FE, and we show that through a process Jake identified and labelled as ‘competitive mediation’, the sports lecturers he interviewed used their experiences as elite sports people to navigate the highly performative environments in which they were working. The positives and negatives of using this strategy for them, their learners and wider society are explored in this chapter. We suggest that although Jake's research focused specifically on sports lecturers in FE settings, his insights can be applied more widely, we reflect on the importance of considering the impact our own diverse lived experiences may have on our sense of professionalism as researchers and practitioners.