Supporting teacher agency and aesthetic experience for sustainable professional development

Significant time, money, and energy are invested in Continuing Professional Development (CPD) across Further Education (FE) colleges in England, with the aim of enhancing teaching strategies, sharing “best” practices, and improving educational quality. Despite these intentions, practitioner perceptions of CPD’s value remain mixed, highlighting concerns about the effectiveness of current approaches. CPD managers often face competing financial and operational demands, alongside pressure to comply with external requirements, resulting in CPD that is frequently instrumental, mandatory, and delivered through one-off events. These practices reflect a data-driven, prescriptive management culture that prioritizes measurable outcomes over meaningful educational experiences. Consequently, teachers are compelled to demonstrate compliance within a system where accountability is unevenly distributed. This medium-scale, multi-method practitioner research study investigates how such compliance-driven CPD practices divert attention and resources from genuine educational improvement. This study explores an alternative model of CPD rooted in teacher agency and enriched through engagement with the arts and aesthetic experiences. Drawing on surveys, semi-structured interviews, critical incidents, and narrative accounts, the findings suggest that this approach fosters more democratic, creative, and impactful professional development. In promoting teacher agency and challenging dominant power structures, this study offers a vision of CPD that supports meaningful educational transformation, with practical examples and recommendations for broader implementation.
Keywords: continuing professional development (CPD); teacher agency; models of educational change and improvement; Further Education (FE); collaboration and cooperation