This paper examines how the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), developed by the Organisation for Economic Co‑operation and Development (OECD), has conceptualised teacher autonomy from its first cycle in 2008 to the most recent edition in 2025. Across these years, international large-scale assessments have grown into powerful global policy instruments, shaping how teachers are perceived, governed, and evaluated. While teacher autonomy is widely regarded as central to professionalism and curriculum‑making, international large-scale assessments often frame autonomy in ways aligned with accountability and performance discourses. This study synthesises conceptual, methodological, and discursive patterns across TALIS cycles and investigates how OECD’s constructions of teacher autonomy elevate or shadow different dimensions of teacher professionalism.

The teacher autonomy framework (Frostenson, 2015; Salokangas et al., 2019; Wermke & Salokangas, 2019) combined with governance perspectives (e.g., Ball & Olmedo, 2013; Pettersson et al., 2016; Pignatelli, 1993; Sobe, 2014) are the analytical lens to capture the continuities and changes in the conceptualisations of teacher autonomy by OECD TALIS in multiple periods and its implications for teacher professionalism and curriculum making.

In short, the teacher autonomy framework can be described including three levels of autonomy—classroom, school, and profession—and identifies four domains in which autonomy is exercised: educational (instruction, planning, assessment), social (discipline, student support, grouping), developmental (professional learning and choices about competence development), and administrative (resource allocation, scheduling, organisational decisions). Teacher autonomy is therefore not limited to instructional choices but distributed across different organisational layers and responsibilities, highlighting how teachers’ space for action is shaped by structural and cultural conditions.

The analysis identifies key continuities. First, teacher autonomy is consistently framed as an important component of an effective teaching profession, particularly in linking autonomy to job satisfaction, motivation, and the attractiveness of teaching careers. This emphasis persists from early cycles, where autonomy was largely implicit, to TALIS 2013 and 2018, where autonomy is directly tied to improving instructional quality and advancing system performance. Second, TALIS has consistently foregrounded autonomy at the classroom level, particularly concerning instructional choices, while giving limited attention to teachers’ roles in curriculum development or broader policy influence. As a result, autonomy is frequently equated with teachers’ individual perceptions of control over pedagogical decisions rather than with their capacity to collectively shape school practices or engage in curriculum making.

At the same time, important changes emerge. The introduction of a dedicated teacher autonomy indicator in TALIS 2018 marks a shift toward measurable, standardised constructs of autonomy, operationalised through scales emphasising satisfaction with classroom control. By 2024–2025, TALIS expands this view to include autonomy in administrative, developmental, and social domains at both school and classroom levels, acknowledging greater contextual diversity. These expansions suggest a growing recognition of the multidimensional nature of teacher autonomy. However, they continue to privilege autonomy at the individual level rather than as a collective professional capacity embedded in institutional structures.

Through a governmentality lens, the paper argues that TALIS operates as a technology of governance: shaping what counts as meaningful autonomy, steering national policies toward particular forms of professional accountability, and constructing teachers as curriculum implementers within performative systems. TALIS thus functions not only as a descriptive tool but also as a normative framework, promoting an understanding of teacher autonomy aligned with OECD’s broader priorities. By foregrounding classroom-level autonomy and largely omitting teachers’ roles in shaping curricular purposes and content, TALIS contributes to a narrowing of teacher professionalism to technical implementation rather than deliberate curriculum making understood as the achievement of teacher agency, according to Priestley et al. (2012, 2015).

This study adopts a qualitative document analysis grounded in discursive institutionalism (Schmidt, 2008) to examine how teacher autonomy is constructed across TALIS cycles from 2008 to 2025. Discursive institutionalism provides a conceptual lens for analysing both the substantive content of policy ideas and the communicative practices through which organisations such as the OECD construct, legitimise, and disseminate educational discourses. The approach distinguishes between three levels of ideas—policy solutions, programmatic beliefs, and philosophical assumptions—and identifies foreground (explicit) and background (implicit) discursive practices (Schmidt, 2008). This makes it well suited to analysing TALIS documents as communicative texts that promote specific understandings of teacher autonomy and professionalism. Data for the study include publicly available TALIS documents across four cycles: the TALIS 2008, 2013, 2018, and 2024/2025 conceptual frameworks, technical reports, and results reports. These documents were selected because they represent the OECD’s official articulation of TALIS purposes, constructs, methodologies, and interpretations of findings. The analysis focuses specifically on sections referencing “teacher autonomy,” “autonomy,” and related constructs at both classroom and school levels. Items related exclusively to school or principal autonomy were excluded to maintain conceptual clarity. The analysis proceeded in three stages. First, all references to teacher autonomy across the documents were extracted and coded according to the three-dimensional model of autonomy—individual, collegial, and professional—derived from Frostenson (2015), Salokangas et al. (2019) and Wermke et al. (2019). Second, the extracted material was analysed according to Schmidt’s three discursive levels (2008). Policy solution discourses were identified primarily in results reports; programmatic discourses were traced through conceptual frameworks; and philosophical discourses were inferred across documents where recurring assumptions appeared. Third, the analysis drew on governmentality perspectives (e.g., Ball & Olmedo, 2013; Pettersson et al., 2016; Pignatelli, 1993; Sobe, 2014) to interpret how TALIS constructs teacher autonomy in relation to accountability, performativity, and governance technologies. A thematic synthesis identified continuities and changes in how autonomy is conceptualised and operationalised across cycles. This included shifts in measurement, teachers’ roles, and links between autonomy, professionalism, curriculum-making, and system improvement. Together, these analytical lenses offer a framework for understanding how TALIS shapes global discourses about teacher professionalism and curriculum making.

The evolution of TALIS from 2008 to 2025 reveals both persistent patterns and significant shifts in how teacher autonomy is conceptualised and operationalised by the OECD. Across all cycles, TALIS reinforces the idea that teacher autonomy is essential for effective teaching and for sustaining the teaching profession. However, this autonomy is consistently framed through an individualised lens that emphasises classroom-level decision-making, particularly in instructional and assessment practices. This foregrounding of individual autonomy shadows broader dimensions of teacher autonomy, especially teachers’ collective influence on curriculum making and policy development. Later cycles, especially TALIS 2024/2025, suggest a partial expansion of autonomy toward administrative, developmental, and social domains. While this broadening acknowledges the complexity of teachers’ work, it remains embedded within accountability structures emphasising performance, monitoring, and system improvement. As a result, teacher autonomy continues to be positioned within an individualised, measurable framework aligned with OECD priorities rather than a holistic vision of teacher autonomy that could contribute to an ecological understanding of teacher agency and curriculum making. By tracing these developments, the paper highlights how global policy instruments shape the discursive boundaries of teacher professionalism and curriculum-making. The study concludes that although TALIS presents autonomy as a mechanism to enhance teacher professionalism, it simultaneously limits the scope of that professionalism by privileging individual, performative aspects of autonomy. Future research could examine how these discourses influence teachers’ practices in national contexts and explore conceptualisations of autonomy that strengthen teachers’ curriculum-making and agency.

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