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Despite the divisions within Northern Ireland's education system along religious and academic lines, it has managed to maintain relative stability, or at least a functional inertia, over the past four decades. The full potential, however, of this system and in particular, the Northern Ireland Curriculum (NIC), has yet to be realised. This paper presents a comprehensive exploration of the intricate interplay between the NIC and Initial Teacher Education (ITE), bringing to the fore the footprint of Lawrence Stenhouse. It critically examines the salient features of the NIC, particularly its alignment with Stenhouse's pedagogical tenets, and its subsequent ramifications on ITE, for both its content and pedagogical strategies. The ambitions are, however, not without their challenges. The overarching shadow of an exam‐centric system stymies the NIC's full realisation, presenting a dichotomy between curriculum goals and pragmatic educational realities. The absence of a coherent Teacher Professional Learning framework also inhibited curriculum development. The Learning Leaders strategy, although yet to be implemented due to the collapse of the Northern Ireland Assembly and consequently lack of financial support, has the potential to pick up the baton of reform and help teachers and school leaders move closer to implementing the NIC in the way it was intended. The paper concludes by identifying the probable, possible, plausible and preferred ways forward for NI's education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teacher autonomy and teacher agency are positively related to teachers' motivation and engagement in teaching. This paper combines the concepts of teacher autonomy and teacher agency to study how Brazilian and Norwegian lower secondary teachers respond to an accountability system marked by a centralised outcomes‐based curriculum and testing. Teacher autonomy concerns the relations between teachers' scope of action and the state's role in providing resources and regulations that extend or constrain this scope of action. Teacher agency refers to teachers' professional action based on their perceptions and experiences of their scope of action as they navigate accountability to respond to educational dilemmas at hand. The findings show that teachers navigate policies in a variety of forms to fit their needs and beliefs and those of their students. Brazilian teachers have a constrained scope of action and possibilities for achieving agency in comparison with their Norwegian counterparts. Norwegian teachers also have their individual autonomy constrained by extended state control over the curriculum and testing. However, the practice of collective work opens up for the exercise of agency because of the possibility of reflection and collective construction of teaching plans and strategies that frame and legitimise teaching work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To examine different approaches to teacher autonomy in nation-states, three countries were selected for a comparative study: Estonia, Finland and Germany. The emphasis of the study lies on the subjective perceptions of upper secondary school teachers (n = 33 semi-structured interviews) regarding their curricular autonomy and experiences of being controlled by the system. The article discusses different concepts of teacher autonomy and agency theoretically and concludes that they are partly overlapping, but not the same. Agency can be understood as the realistic actualization of autonomy within the constraints of the teaching profession, while autonomy is, in theory, more liberating, focusing on self-directedness, capacity for autonomous action and freedom from control. The data analysis showed that the expectations of teachers as to the amount of desired autonomy varied greatly. While the Finnish teachers in the study perceived control over teachers’ work to be unnecessary, due to their high professionalism, the Estonian and German teachers did not advocate absence of control, instead preferring to ‘have complete freedom to choose within limits.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]