Critical professionalism: why we all need the courage to question

By Dr Martin Hoskin, Senior Teaching Fellow, University of Portsmouth

There is a quiet crisis in education, not one of standards or outcomes, but of purpose. We are living in a performative age defined by data, targets, and accountability measures that have reshaped the way teachers and leaders think about their work. In education, the pressures are constant. Every week brings a new form to complete, a new audit to satisfy, a new demand to evidence “impact.” Behind it all sits the assumption that if something cannot be measured, it cannot matter.

What happens when our professional identity becomes defined more by compliance than by conscience? What is lost when education becomes performance? These questions lie at the heart of what it means to be an educator today, and they invite us to look again at what we value, what we stand for, and what we are willing to defend.

This is not a call to rebellion. It is a call to reflection, and perhaps to collective courage. Because the courage to question is essential to sustaining professional integrity in a system that often rewards obedience over judgment.

The performative trap

Stephen Ball (2003) warned that performativity was reshaping teachers into producers of measurable outcomes rather than moral agents. Gert Biesta (2015) later argued that the “learnification” of education, its reduction to learning outcomes and indicators, has hollowed out its ethical and democratic purpose. These forces are visible everywhere in education.

Lesson observations often focus on the right buzzwords rather than the depth of learning. Meetings turn not to students but to targets. Conversations begin with “impact” and end with “compliance.” Gradually, the professional language of teaching is replaced by a vocabulary of performance. The teacher becomes a technician, a deliverer, someone who ensures the system runs smoothly.

None of this happens because educators lack care or intelligence. It happens because we work within a culture that has normalised measurement as the ultimate expression of value. We tell ourselves it is for the greater good, that it raises standards and protects learners. Yet over time, the metrics begin to define what matters, and the human purpose of education slips quietly out of view.

At this point, we might pause and ask whether this performative shift represents a deliberate agenda or simply a different way of viewing education. Is the focus on efficiency and outcomes part of a wider political and economic project that seeks to align education with market principles, or is it an unintended consequence of genuine attempts to improve quality? Perhaps both are true. The language of performance may have begun as a means to accountability, yet it now shapes a vision of education that serves certain interests while marginalising others.

In my own work as a teacher, leader, and teacher educator, I have seen how easily values such as care, equity, and autonomy can be squeezed by the machinery of accountability. Policy rhetoric often speaks the language of inclusion and aspiration, but in practice it can narrow professional judgment and silence moral purpose. When the system becomes more interested in proof than in trust, teachers learn to protect themselves rather than to take risks for their students.

Complicity and compliance

This raises an uncomfortable question. To what extent are we, as educators, complicit in our own professional erosion? How often do we comply with initiatives that contradict the very purpose of education we claim to serve? Is our compliance driven by fear, habit, or genuine belief that the system knows best? Or perhaps by a quiet resignation that resistance is futile?

It is also worth considering how easily an agenda can become invisible when it is presented as “common sense.” If performative practices are framed as natural, neutral, or necessary, then questioning them can appear unreasonable or even disloyal. This is how ideology works, it hides in the everyday, shaping what we see as normal and what we no longer notice. To ask whether there is an agenda is not conspiracy; it is professionalism. It is the responsibility to examine who benefits from the way things are and who might be silenced by them.

These are hard questions to ask, and harder still to answer. Many teachers simply want to do good work, to help students learn and to keep their jobs secure, yet too often they feel unable to do what they know is morally right. In quietly accepting policies that reduce our work to numbers, we may also be accepting the slow erosion of professional trust. The cost of that compliance is not only professional but moral. It shapes what we teach, how we teach, and what our students come to believe education is for.

Recognising this is not about blame; it is about honesty. The first step toward change is to notice what feels wrong, to name it, and to begin talking about it. That act of naming is, in itself, a small act of courage.

Acts of quiet courage

Despite these constraints, acts of professional courage continue to happen in education every day. They happen in mentoring conversations where new teachers are encouraged to ask why, not just how. They happen in team meetings where someone risks questioning whether a new initiative really serves students. They happen when a teacher closes the classroom door and chooses to teach in a way that puts care and curiosity first.

This is what Day and Sachs (2004) described as critical professionalism: a stance rooted in ethical reasoning, social responsibility, and reflective judgment. It is not loud or heroic. It is quiet, relational, and deeply human. It begins in dialogue, in listening, in creating spaces where professional talk is not just about data but about values.

Courage, in this context, is the practice of integrity. It means choosing to teach with hope even when circumstances make that hope fragile. It is the deliberate act of showing our students what sincerity and reflection look like, so they may understand how to live and act with purpose in a world that too often prizes appearance over conviction.

Cochran-Smith (2020) and Giroux (2011) both remind us that teaching is always a moral and political act. To teach critically is to acknowledge the power we hold to shape not only knowledge but human possibility. Every time we choose to question rather than comply, we reaffirm education as a moral and social practice, not a technical one.

Collective agency: enough is enough  

But courage alone is not enough. Reflection and integrity matter most when they become shared. The transformation that education needs will not come from another policy directive or accountability framework. It will come when educators themselves decide that enough is enough, that care, equity, and autonomy are not optional extras but the foundations of professional life.

Collective change begins in small ways: reclaiming the language we use, talking again about learning rather than delivery, valuing professional conversation over performance review, building communities of inquiry where we support each other to think critically and act ethically, reimagining accountability as responsibility to our students and society, not just to policy.

This is not naïve optimism. It is a recognition that systems change when the people inside them start to act differently together. If we, as educators, agree that our professional purpose is being distorted by performativity, then we have the collective power to reclaim it. Change will not be granted from above; it will be built from within.

Courage as hope

The courage to question is not rebellion for its own sake; it is an expression of hope. To ask questions is to affirm that education lives in connection, not competition, a living exchange grounded in trust, curiosity, and care. Each time we wonder aloud about the purpose of education and those it truly serves, we reclaim our role as moral agents in the shared work of teaching and leading.

In the end, courage in education is often expressed quietly. It lives in the spaces between policies, in conversations that make people think differently, in moments when we choose to act with integrity even when it costs us something. It reminds us that professionalism is not compliance with external demands but commitment to internal values.

The courage to question begins with individuals, but it grows through community. When we question together, we begin to reclaim the soul of education. And in doing so, we remind ourselves that change is still possible, and that the future of education remains, however constrained, in our hands.