Teenagers need it, toddlers love it and many workers feel stifled if they don’t get enough of it.

Autonomy, loosely defined as the freedom to direct one’s own course, is generally regarded as a good thing, both in life and in the workplace. 

But as schools increasingly struggle to hold onto staff, the evidence suggests that many teachers currently feel that they are lacking autonomy - and this could be causing them to vote with their feet.

A recent teacher wellbeing survey conducted by Tes found that 57 per cent of classroom teachers and 41 per cent of middle leaders said they lacked autonomy. 

These findings are echoed elsewhere. In the 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) of teachers across 48 OECD countries, England’s secondary teachers had the third-lowest level of agreement with the statement that their “school provides staff with opportunities to actively participate in school decisions”. They also had the third-lowest level of agreement with the statement that they “have control over determining course content in their target class”.

Meanwhile, a key 2020 study from the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) found that teachers are 16 percentage points less likely than similar professionals to report having “a lot” of influence over how they do their job.

Research suggests that this perceived lack of autonomy among teachers should be a big concern to policymakers and school leaders who are trying to recruit and retain teaching staff.

Why autonomy matters

Psychological research looking at “self-determination theory” suggests that autonomy is an essential factor in creating “intrinsic motivation”. This is when you do things because they are inherently engaging to you, not because someone says you have to do them.

Those working in conditions that emphasise a greater reliance on intrinsic motivation are more likely to have a better sense of wellbeing and job satisfaction and are more likely to remain in their jobs. 

On the other hand, workplaces that focus on extrinsic motivation, through rewards and punishments, are thought to risk undermining staff members’ sense of feeling trusted and their own intrinsic motivation. This can potentially lead to disengagement and burnout.

Indeed, research on teachers in Norway found a positive association between perceived autonomy and job satisfaction, and a negative association between autonomy and burnout.

So, in a world of Ofsted, government diktats and knee-jerk whole-school policies, it’s not difficult to see why teacher autonomy might be important for schools.

“Autonomy is one of those factors to do with how work ‘feels’, it can lead to a greater sense of job satisfaction,” says Jack Worth, workforce lead at the (NFER) and co-author of its 2020 report on the importance of teacher autonomy for recruitment and retention. “Because teachers have more sense of control over what they are doing, this can give a greater sense of impact in the classroom.”

And this, he continues, is vital for retaining experienced teachers: “Teacher happiness and job satisfaction remain important when we are in a situation where there are not enough teachers coming into the profession to meet supply.”

It is clear that at least some teachers crave and need autonomy, and that it is in schools’ best interests to try to provide them with it. But, what does autonomy actually look like in the context of a school?

Dr Sam Sims, lecturer at UCL Institute of Education, explains that it is first important to differentiate between autonomy over time and task.

“Teachers, just by the nature of the job and timetable and the kind of institution [teaching] is, have very low levels of autonomy over time,” he says. In other words, they often have little choice over the hours or days that they work - or even over which aspects of their job they do when.

“Then there’s autonomy over task: how do you go about the stuff you’ve got to do in any given hour of the day. Here, teachers have potentially more autonomy,” Sims adds.

Indeed, the NFER study suggests that teachers have relatively high autonomy in their own classrooms, over factors such as layout and teaching methods.

“They’re the only adult in that room, they’re often considered to be the subject expert, they know their pupils better than other people do,” says Sims.

Meanwhile, the same study suggests teachers have lower autonomy over things such as assessment and feedback (between 29 and 33 per cent) and pupil data collection (12 per cent).

How can schools increase autonomy?

So, if a school wants to increase teacher autonomy in order to create a happier and more satisfied workforce, how should it go about it? Is it time to tell teachers to throw the scripted lesson out of the window, forget about retrieval practice, data drops, behaviour policies and time travel back to the 1970s for some truly off-piste classes?

No, says Sims. “If you left a teacher in a sealed-off container with a bunch of pupils so that they were never conversing with other professionals, they didn’t have access to an evidence base, their views were never being constructively challenged, they were never observing peers, that would be ‘disengaged autonomy’. You would basically just end up with somebody doing whatever they thought was best.

“The problem there is that autonomy descends into ‘whatever my hunch is’.”

The key, says Sims, is not to let teachers loose, but instead to get them to endorse the policies and practices the school has, something that is easier if there are clear reasons behind them.

The word autonomy, he continues, is often used as a synonym for “discretion”, but that is only “halfway there”.

“Most psychologists would describe autonomy as acting in such a way as you endorse the reasons for that action,” he says.

He gives the example of the popular phonics programme Read Write Inc. Teachers may lack discretion over whether they teach it or not, but that doesn’t mean they would disagree with using it.

“If they’ve read some research or listened to a very compelling presentation for the reasons for using it, then they may endorse using it, basically really buying into it. Despite not having any discretion they’d still be acting autonomously because they agree with the reasons for doing it,” says Sims.

“It’s immensely important to communicate the rationale for school policies. You’ve always got to start with why we do something, otherwise it’s a sort of diktat handed from on high that can be pretty demotivating.”

But no amount of communication helps if there are bad reasons for bringing initiatives in, he adds; the evidence base must be convincing and thoroughly understood by those communicating it, from leadership down.

And while some academics fear that the increasing use of research evidence is a threat to teachers’ autonomy and professionalism, forcing teachers to “execute” whatever the evidence tells them to, Sims believes the opposite is true.

He gives the example of doctors who have very strong autonomy, despite much of what they do being driven by research evidence and official guidelines.

“Despite the narrowing of their discretion, medics have a very strong understanding of this evidence base and they strongly endorse the reasoning and evidence base behind that guidance…they feel highly autonomous and they buy into what they are doing,” he explains.

The workload issue

Autonomy in the context of workload is also an interesting issue for schools to consider, Sims says. 

While “pure” workload has a surprisingly inconsistent relationship with retention and job satisfaction in the research literature, he has developed a new way of measuring teachers’ reported workload, which takes into account how much of their work is generated by going out of their way to comply with requests made by school leaders.

“We find that workload does have one of the strongest relationships with retention of teachers - when you describe workload that impinges on your autonomy,” says Sims.

“It’s not the hours that matter. The thing that really demotivates teachers and often leads to them leaving the profession is spending an hour and a half on the weekend doing one data drop using meaningless data from a badly designed assessment, merely because senior leadership are feeling a bit worried about the next Ofsted inspection.”

Another key area that schools and government policy should look at, says Worth, is teachers’ involvement in the setting of their own professional development goals. This is something that his NFER study suggests is underutilised, with 38 per cent of teachers saying that they have “a little” or “no” influence over them.

Worth points out that many of the teachers he spoke to also criticised Inset days and whole-school CPD that wasn’t necessarily relevant or engaging, particularly to more experienced staff.

The report states: “We find that teachers’ perceived autonomy over their professional development goals has the greatest association with improved satisfaction and intention to stay in teaching.”

It does not suggest giving teachers “total control” but says schools need to ensure “that teachers can have some autonomy in how they choose to meet those goals.”

So, there you have it: autonomy on the job is most definitely a good thing. And finding ways to provide teachers with more of it certainly does not fall completely out of school leaders’ control.