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Curriculum materials (schemes of work, lesson plans, etc.) play a complex and pivotal role in school and teacher practices. The adaptation and development of curriculum materials often constitute part of teacher professional development (PD) activities. However, compared with research examining the relationship between PD and teacher professional change, the role of curriculum materials in professional learning remains under-researched and under-theorised. We address this gap by applying a multi-perspectival approach to data from a PD programme in which teachers were supported to develop curriculum materials. We use an interconnected model to analyse the role of curriculum materials in catalysing change in individual teachers’ practice. Our use of Boundary Theory proposes that curriculum material adoption is mediated by the solidity of boundaries between school practice and research findings, and Actor-Network Theory perspectives examine the assemblage of networked relations within and beyond schools that are entangled in curriculum materials. We highlight how combining linear and non-linear perspectives may contribute to improved understanding of the complexity of supporting teachers’ learning and use our analyses to outline implications of using curriculum materials in teacher professional development.

Policymakers and school leaders seek to improve the quality of teaching through curriculum innovations and professional development programmes, increasingly drawing on evidence‐based approaches. For innovations involving teacher professional learning, a causal connection is posited between professional development activities, teacher engagement in them, changed practices and outcomes for learners. However, implementation and teachers’ engagement in professional development activity varies. Reasons for this include the influence of both the local and wider systemic environment in which the activity takes place and actors’ relationships to these environments. Currently, both environments and actors’ relationships are often shaped by performativity discourses and pressures. Typical implementation and process evaluation methodologies are limited by a focus on the easily measurable, often using tools that do not support fine‐grained understanding of how actors’ situations, purposes and systemic influences, and the interrelationships between these, mediate and shape different degrees of participation. Developing more in‐depth accounts are hindered by a relative lack of theorisation of context in relation to professional development. The paper uses a set of theoretical constructs to provide a stronger account of the variation and engagement in participation in such activity, with particular attention paid to the way school and teachers’ positioning within performativity systems influences participation. Constructs employed are teachers and schools’ positioning in terms of relative degrees of systemic privilege or disadvantage—understood as economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital—figured worlds and system coupling.

Despite the very large literature on teacher careers from an individual perspective, there is relatively little that links the perspectives of teachers themselves to how schools as organisations approach careers. The aim of this paper is, first, to outline how teachers’ orientations towards careers change across three dimensions, and, second, to examine how schools as organisations deal with career, developing a model of organisational responses, including developing a concept of ‘career culture’, derived from an analysis of interviews regarding the first three years of teaching conducted with senior leaders and second-year teachers themselves. By considering the fit between individuals’ career orientations and school career cultures, the paper surfaces both the fluid nature of these orientations and the subsequent potential instability of the fit.

This article presents the results of a study of the impact of three programmes of the National College for School Leadership (NCSL), namely Leading from the Middle, the National Professional Qualification for Headship and the Leadership Programme for Serving Headteachers. All three programmes embody a blended learning approach that includes an in-school component. This article focuses on factors within the programmes that influence learning from the in-school components. It focuses particularly on factors relating to individual participants and to the school contexts within which they work. The article relates the findings to previous literature on work-based learning and suggests a broader model of the factors that influence the outcomes of leadership development programmes.

Continuing professional development (CPD) evaluation in education has been heavily influenced by ‘level models’, deriving from the work of Kirkpatrick and Guskey in particular, which attempt to trace the processes through which CPD interventions achieve outcomes. This paper considers the strengths and limitations of such models, and in particular the degree to which they are able to do justice to the complexity of CPD and its effects. After placing level models within the broader context of debates about CPD evaluation, the paper reports our experience of developing such models heuristically for our own evaluation practice. It then draws on positivist, realist and constructivist traditions to consider some more fundamental ontological and epistemological questions to which they give rise. The paper concludes that level models can be used in a number of ways and with differing emphases, and that choices made about their use will need to reflect both theoretical choices and practical considerations.