Currently there is unprecedented attention being directed at the ‘quality’ of school teachers in education systems around the world and the part they might play in developing globally competitive knowledge-based economies. Yet teachers’ work has historically been organised at the national and sub-national scales. In this paper I examine the ways in which the national and sub-national are now being enrolled as important sites for globalisation through an exploration of two political projects, the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) and the World Bank’s SABER-Teacher. Drawing on Bernstein’s (1990, 2000) concepts of ‘fields of symbolic control’, ‘classification’ and ‘framing’, I chart the nature and extent of the denationalisation of teachers’ work, the consequences for teachers as professionals, and how these processes might be contested. I show the ways in which the invocation of a global imaginary of shared risk and future, the emergence of trans-boundary relations, the relationally interconnected nature of globalising teacher learning, and new forms of private authority, are contributing to the denationalisation of education and a transformation in the field of symbolic control over teacher policies and practices.