Recent curriculum policy in the United Kingdom and elsewhere has defined teachers as ‘agents of change’(Goodson, 2003; Nieveen, 2011; Priestley, 2011; Sinnema and Aitken, Menter and Hulme, this volume). This is a significant shift in emphasis following several decades of policies that worked to de-professionalize teachers, replacing teacher agency with prescriptive curricula and oppressive regimes of testing and inspection (see, for example, Gleeson and Gunter, 2001; Biesta, 2010; Keddie, Mills and Pendergast, 2011; Lingard and McGregor, this volume). The [re] turn to teacher agency, heralded in policies such as Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), represents a change in the professional orientation of teachers. It not only gives explicit permission to teachers to exert high [er] degrees of professional agency within the contexts in which they work, but actually sees agency as an important dimension of teachers’ professionalism.

The renewed emphasis on teacher agency raises a number of questions. These are partly about definition and theory, such as the question what we mean by agency and, more specifically, by teacher agency, and what it would mean for teachers to be agents of change. And they are partly empirical questions about the factors that promote or hinder teacher agency. In this chapter we address both types of question, drawing upon findings from the Teacher Agency and Curriculum Change project, undertaken in the context of teachers’ implementation of CfE. 1 The project involved one year of ethnographic research within a single education