A great deal of new curriculum policy is premised on the notion that the teacher will be an agent of change. Such policy is problematic: it assumes a linear, policy to practice chain, with an underlying ‘schools in deficit’ assumption; and it tends to over-emphasise the importance of the personal capacity of the teacher, while neglecting the cultural and structural dimensions that form part of the ecology of schooling, and which help shape teacher agency (Priestley, Biesta & Robinson, 2015 in press). In many schools, this ecology includes extremely performative cultures (Wilkins, 2011) strongly linked to associated systems and structures, including output regulation of the curriculum (Nieveen & Kuiper, 2011), which have been shown to have eroded teacher autonomy (Biesta, 2004; Priestley, 2014), creating difficult dilemmas for practitioners as they engage with and develop the curriculum. The predominant policy approach to fostering teacher agency has been associated with particular problems when teachers are required to develop or implement centrally mandated curriculum reform, as there is often dissonance between the new initiative and their existing frames of meaning (Wierenga, et al., 2015), contributing to an ‘implementation gap’ (Supovitz & Weinbaum, 2008) between policy and practice. In this paper, we utilise an ecological approach to understanding teacher agency (Priestley, Biesta & Robinson, 2015 in press). We demonstrate how the ecology of teacher agency comprises a multifarious range of different elements, including: teacher beliefs and knowledge, the discourses that frame teachers’ work, internal and external professional relationships, washback from assessment practices, and the conflicting demands of different policies. We illustrate how attention to ways in which the cultural and structural as well as individual dimensions of teachers’ professional work are socially mediated can help to foster their achievement of agency, which in turn may enable them to engage more constructively with curriculum policy, as they enact their practice.

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