Code of Conduct and Practice for Registered Teachers

published:16 Sep 2009

The General Teaching Council for England approved the revised Code of Conduct and Practice for Registered Teachers on 1 July 2009. The revised Code was developed through an extensive process of public and professional consultation and came into effect on 1 October 2009.

The new Code makes a powerful positive statement about contemporary teaching. It shows how teachers encourage learning and how they work with colleagues, other professionals and parents. Instead of describing the unacceptable, it sets out a shared picture of teacher professionalism.

We built the Code on evidence first and foremost from teachers themselves, but also from what parents, employers and other colleagues from the wider children’s workforce told us are the essential characteristics of the teacher’s role.

The eight principles of the Code cover familiar ground. There are strong similarities with other professional Codes and with the statements that schools use to describe how they will support children and work with parents and the local community. There is a firm and clear commitment to equality, to working as part of the whole school community, and to honesty and integrity.

The Code has a regulatory purpose as well. Here, the Code gives examples, against each of the eight principles, of where the GTC has taken action in the past and may need to do so in the future.

The Code’s expectations apply equally to registered teachers and provisionally-registered teachers, except that provisions relating to competence do not apply to provisionally-registered trainee teachers.