Abstract

Every year, 200,000 learners retake GCSE mathematics in Further Education. National policy calls this a failure, with only 20% achieving Grade 4. Yet the mathematics teachers in this study observe something policy cannot measure, that learners whose fear transforms into confidence, whose shame becomes engagement, whose sense of themselves as mathematical beings fundamentally shifts. These teachers recognise this as success. Policy does not.

This contradiction is not incidental. It defines daily professional experience. Teachers must cover 50 topics in 30 weeks with learners carrying years of mathematical trauma and repeated failure. The pedagogical work they identify as foundational for example, rebuilding shattered confidence, addressing deep anxiety, establishing psychological safety, takes time, cannot be rushed, and leaves no trace in achievement data. Teachers face an untenable situation where they must simultaneously meet external accountability demands while maintaining devotion to their professional judgment about what genuinely matters.

· How do teachers navigate this?

· How do they make sense of being told they're failing when they know they're succeeding?

· How do they judge their own professional effectiveness when external metrics render their most important work invisible?

This study investigated these questions through a social constructivist lens. Rather than examining whether teachers comply with or resist external standards, it asked how teachers collectively construct professional meaning when competing frameworks collide. Drawing on communities of practice theory and institutional discourse analysis, semi-structured interviews with ten FE mathematics teachers in Northeast England revealed something significant, that teachers do not simply resist or comply. Instead, they engage in ongoing institutional discourse negotiation, collectively constructing alternative definitions of success that coexist with external requirements.

Three findings highlight this process. Professional identity develops through shared narratives such as the ‘accidental teacher’ story told by eight of ten participants and the principle of ‘rebuild confidence first’ articulated by seven participants. These narratives circulate through mentoring relationships, enabling coherent identity when formal training infrastructure is absent. Teachers also collectively negotiate professional excellence through workplace conversation, constructing quality indicators that better capture their practice. Six participants independently used ‘lightbulb moments’ to define meaningful success, explicitly contrasting this with Grade 4 achievement. Seven articulated shared critique of ‘teaching to the test’ as inappropriate professional conduct. Nine described institutional marginalisation using nearly identical metaphors, creating collective understanding of shared constraint.

The sophisticated pedagogical responses to complex challenges including addressing anxiety, demonstrating relevance, and managing extreme ability ranges emerge through peer observation, collaborative planning, and mentoring relationships rather than individual innovation or formal training.

The research reveals that collective meaning-making is not aberrant resistance but sophisticated professional navigation. Teachers maintain integrity and commitment precisely through constructing alternative quality standards. The study demonstrates how professional communities sustain themselves under impossible conditions, not by transcending constraint but by collectively making meaning within it. It offers a different understanding of professional excellence in constrained contexts where expertise emerges through the very collaborative processes that constraint necessitates.

By revealing how teachers collectively construct professional meaning under impossible conditions, the research suggests pathways for supporting rather than undermining the collaborative processes through which expertise actually develops.