In this special issue, we start from a general policy assumption about teachers and teaching particularly clearly summarised in the 2005 report Teachers Matter: Attracting, Developing and Retaining Effective Teachers by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). The report states that teacher policy is high on national agendas and that teachers are ‘the most significant resource in schools’ for improving efficiency and equity in school.

However, we regard the policy field mainly as the background, from which we retain the fundamental claim that ‘teachers matter’. In contrast to policy documents, the intention in this special issue is to explore in what different ways, at what different times and in what different spaces teachers truly matter, without having any answers in advance – that is, outside the area of policy highroads but still against a backdrop of a policy of accountability and standards.

Conceptions of school and teaching influence the way teachers think about teaching and how they actually conduct their work in the classroom. With reference to Hansen (2001), teaching has its own integrity. Teaching here is viewed as a moral and intellectual practice developed from within the person, rather than getting one’s norms imposed from outside. Through our subjectivity, we can begin to know ourselves and the world we inhabit, imprinted by culture and history. Genuine learning and growth, for teachers and their students, cannot be hastened; it is a process with its own dimension of time. Teachers’ professional identities, who they are and the meanings teachers attribute to their work and the meanings that are attributed to them by others, are shaped not only by organisational and subject-related aspects but also by their relationships to colleagues, students and parents and a life outside of school (Day & Gu 2010).