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How many times have we heard colleagues grumble about going through institutional ethics review as a hurdle to jump? Or, conversely, have we heard researchers not employed by research institutions worried about not having a committee to review and support their research plans? Ideally you have access to such a committee. They exist to offer checks and balances, consider participant and community perspectives and ask questions of you, the expert in your research, some of which you may but some you might not have considered. They should not be dictating what and how you research. Ideally your relationship with an ethics committee is one in which you are keen to engage in dialogue from when you first raise ethics-related questions through a formal review of your initial plans and onwards throughout the research as the project develops or issues arise. It should not be one shrouded in opaque expectations and bruising experiences.

This presentation will cover a spectrum of (often fictional) experiences of researchers’ relationships with ethics committees and offer recommendations for researchers, whether in schools, independent researchers, in research institutions such as universities or on research ethics committees.

Contemporary policy approaches to initial teacher education and teacher development in the nations of Britain and beyond unproblematically assume a general ethical orientation for teachers and school leaders involving social justice and a sense of responsibility for social improvement. The work of the school teacher involves having high aspirations for all students, and a motivation to apply insights drawn from educational research and evidence for the transformation of life chances. While classroom teaching is therefore presented (often implicitly) as an activity that has enormous moral significance and purpose, the extent to which difficult ethical questions emerge and challenge teachers and school leaders in their daily practice is often neglected or played down. I hope to draw attention to the moral ambiguity of the situation of contemporary schooling. The application of evidence requires classroom teachers and school leaders to make trade-offs in which some students win and others lose. In addition to this, and regardless of whether they recognise it explicitly, all teachers are moral educators, in that the decisions they make in the classroom, their approaches to compulsion and discipline, and their application of school ‘policy’ to an individual situation, exert a lasting moral influence on their students. I want to ask two uncomfortable questions: to what extent is it possible to be a ‘good’ teacher within contemporary systems of schooling? Can we affirm the decision to ‘turn away’ from school teaching on ethical grounds?

Much of the literature on ethics in education is about research ethics and in this talk I will discuss some of the thinking behind the 5th edition of Â鶹ÒùԺ’s Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research, which I edited. I will particularly concentrate on whether consent is the be-all and end-all and the various ways in which obtaining consent may be problematic. I will also look at what to do when there are conflicts between what is best for different participants and for the researcher. Shifting to more academic discourse, I will also discuss the different understandings of autonomy in Kant and John Stuart Mill and at the relevance of this for educational research ethics.

At the same time, I am very aware that it’s much harder being an academic nowadays than when I started – and getting harder year by year – and I am writing this Abstract only a week after Jason Arday’s death. I will therefore also look at ethics in academia more broadly including different understandings of ‘the good’, at the role of care – both of ourselves and of others – and at what one should do when working within an imperfect system.