In line with the conference theme, this paper explores teachers’ relational knowledge for creating inclusive school communities that foster the potential and wellbeing of all members.

Global trends of increasing uncertainty and diversity, migration flows or the spread of AI all have a profound impact on education. At the same time education is a critical site for change-making that can empower citizens to shape their future, but also those of communities and societies. Teachers are among the key actors for addressing the challenges that arise from these trends. Recent studies examined how teachers lead and respond to educational change in different domains, such as technological innovation (Reinius et al., 2022), responses to Covid (Ehren et al., 2021), climate change (Andrzejewski, 2016), rise of AI (Lameras, 2022), as well as inclusion of increasingly diverse school populations (Li & Ruppar, 2020). These studies point to the critical importance of relationships and community-building as part of teachers’ work to share and mobilise relevant knowledge and support. However, teaching is traditionally seen as an individualistic teacher-classroom activity, while collaboration for engaging with the wider contexts that may constrain, as well as advance their capacity to respond to and lead change has been underexplored in teacher research and development.

When considering the knowledge base for teachers in the contexts of responding to and leading change, it is important to distinguish between the wider structural arrangements that are largely outside teachers’ sphere of influence in many systems, and those which are within the remit of their own practice, as members of school communities. The difficulty in sustaining collaborative cultures within highly centralized and bureaucratic school systems has long been recognized (Hargreaves, 1994); yet collegial relationships help teachers exercise their relational agency to adapt policy requirements to fit some practices and reshape others (Robinson, 2012). While teachers’ responses to policy and structural conditions are often reactive, there is also evidence of the potential in exercising collective relational agency through knowledge exchange and relationship-building.

This paper considers research evidence that informs a new, relational knowledge base that underlies teachers’ capacity to create inclusive learning communities and build positive relationships with other actors, including pupils and families, their colleagues as well as specialists and other professionals. It also considers the implication for teacher development  asking:How can teachers develop such relational knowledge?

Teachers’ ways of working together with each other, with students and their families, and with other professionals were analysed using the lens of inclusive pedagogy (Florian, 2012; Florian & Black-Hawkins, 2011) to examine how its principles reflected in the responses that teachers make when their students encounter barriers to learning and participation. The analytical framework of relational agency (Edwards, 2007, 2010) has been applied to gage the collective capacity of various professionals to align their purposes and actions to those of others in working relationships in which different kinds of expertise are brought to bear on a given situation. Collective agency (Archer, 2000) implies that actors contribute to change (or status quo) together, not in a way that a particular actor wants but as a result of interactions. Our analysis focuses on teachers’ interactions that reach out to other actors in diverse roles both within and beyond school, such as ways of working with specialists (Pantić et al., 2024).

The paper exemplifies how teachers interact to mobilise support for change using evidence generated in recent studies of teachers’ collaboration around support for inclusion of migrant students (Hökkä et al., 2025; Pantić et al., 2024). Mixed-method data from a recent multinational TEAMS project (Teaching that Matters for Migrant Students: Understanding levers of Integration in Finland, Scotland and Sweden) including teachers’ collaboration networks from 7 schools mapped with social network survey, and complemented with qualitative data from online teacher logs and interviews, is used to illustrate the kinds of relational knowledge that exists in school communities, but often remains tacit and informal. The paper synthesises the evidence these and other studies in the areas of teacher agency for inclusive education (Florian & Pantić, 2017; Pantić et al., 2021; Pantić & Florian, 2015) to make theoretical sense out of how teachers engage with other actors for addressing risks of exclusion and underachievement, and other forms of marginalisation. These findings are then discussed considering their implications for the relational knowledge that underlies teachers’ capacity to lead and respond to change, and the implications for teacher development. Our research examined teachers’ moment-to-moment interactions that, over time, build more stable inclusive relationships. For example, TEAMS data illustrated examples of working with language specialists as a resource for teachers to better understand students’ cultural background or exchange resources as a resource for teachers themselves rather than delegating responsibility for migrant student support. They exemplify cases of taking collective responsibility for pupils’ learning and wellbeing that requires teachers and other actors to negotiate professional boundaries and work flexibly together (Edwards, 2010). At times this involves setting aside institutional objectives to respond quickly to a given situation, for example, a crisis in a student’s life may necessitate prioritising the need to attend to pupils’ needs holistically to facilitate coordinated action of many professionals. While practices will vary greatly depending on the risks, it is commonly recognised that addressing them requires collaboration of many actors (Ainscow, 2005), for example, in multi-agency working between education, health and social services, not only relating to their learning, but also emotional wellbeing. In our study working closely with colleagues and support professionals was crucial for overcoming the linguistic and cultural barriers migrant students faced (Pantić et al., 2024).

Teachers leveraged their connections and relationships to gain insights into students' backgrounds, drawing information from various sources within the school community, and seeking help from experts to navigate specific situations. These interactions are shaped differently by different institutional settings across countries and between schools using the same support systems. For example, the patterns of exchange of knowledge and support in three schools in Scotland often revolved around experts such as English as Additional Language or Support for Learning with varying levels of reliance on such specialists to work with students directly. Across the three countries, teachers with migrant backgrounds were both sought out more and reached out to others pro-actively to seek support for migrant students. These patterns were especially visible in Swedish schools with higher diversity of teachers and more structured opportunities for collaboration. Interestingly, the link between professional autonomy and agency was not straightforward and higher levels of autonomy, for example in Finland, meant that teachers could choose whether and how to collaborate around migrant support (Manninen et al., 2022). We discuss how these insights could inform teacher development to make teachers more aware and intentional about their interactions and prepare them to collaborate with other actors to remove barriers for achieving their professional purposes together. The paper proposes a shift from focus on individual competence to a collective, relational agency in teacher development for learning how to use the given scope of professional autonomy, to help teachers understand how their interactions with each other and with other actors contribute to the transformation and reproduction of the structures in which they work. We discuss how relational teacher development could help teachers construct their collective agency by adapting policy requirements to fit their professional commitments and work together to articulate and act upon their common goals in particular contexts-for-action.

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