The research studies reported here compares education policy and practice across three European countries, each with different educational cultures and traditions and each facing the challenge of responding to PISA measures of cross-national variations in student achievement (OECD, 2007; Robitaille and Taylor, 1997). In response policy across countries has focussed on raising the educational standards achieved by students in a socio-political climate where education is seen as a vehicle for national economic success.

The construction of teachers’ professional identities and, hence, their priorities and perceived responsibilities have been linked to the national culture and educational traditions in which teachers work (Osborn & Broadfoot, 1992; 1993; Broadfoot & Osborn, 1993). Research has documented how teachers mediate the external requirements placed upon them in terms of nationally specific professional values and understandings, producing interpretations of both their priorities and desirable classroom practices which often differ from those intended by government directives (Osborn, 1996; Osborn et al, 1997). Countries in the present study have been chosen to reflect a range of cultures and education traditions: Denmark can be characterised as largely democratic, England, after more than twenty years of reform, as techno-rationalist and Germany as humanist.

 Whilst other studies have explored the social and cultural situatedness of teaching at a macro-sociological level, micro-sociologically we seek to explore and compare, in the enactment of that situatedness, how teachers mediate often contradictory local, national and perhaps broader social and cultural influences on their practice. In this teachers are seen not just the passive victims of imposed educational reform. They bring their own experiences and perspectives, and have the potential to actively and creatively mediate policy change and in some cases adapt, change or subvert it. In this we take up Alexander’s (2009) challenge to engage in comparative pedagogy.

 This research is set in a socio-cultural frame. In this, teachers’ practices cannot be regarded in isolation; rather they are co-constructions, inseparable from the conceptual resources and agendas their students bring and the physical assets of the environment in which they work. Competent teachers are those whose situated practices combine with those of other participants to realise influential but contingent, relational and socially situated outcomes, many of which are assigned to their students, better than those of less competent ones. Thus we refer to the situated expertise of competent teachers or, more succinctly, situated teacher expertise.

Our focus is the messiness of routine classroom activity, looking at how teachers’ practices are played out, situated and torn between meeting a diverse range of personal and socially defined objectives. Educational communities have many ever-changing and often competing goals and related discourses and practices, conditioned by contextual norms. Communities are dynamic with teachers constantly engaged in an ongoing mediation between different factors, re-negotiating their competence and their professional identities. As Ball puts it, ‘teaching has always involved making decisions within a complex and rich field of contradictions, dilemmas and priorities’ (Ball, 2006: 83; see also Berlak and Berlak, 1981).

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