Empowering teacher voices in an education policy discussion: Paradoxes of representation

•The realisation of teacher voice in an international policy workshop was investigated.•Voices are enabled and constrained by repertoire, social position, topics and gatekeepers.•Paradoxically, the teachers whose voices were most dominant in the teacher workshop were also the least typical.

This article investigates the problems and paradoxes of attempting to empower teacher voices within the context of an international conference of policy-makers, academic researchers and practitioners. We examine the distribution of talk within a teacher workshop: who spoke, how, and to whom did the group and broader audiences listen? We trace the emergence of ideas in the workshop discussions and their trajectory into the joint teacher-policy-maker panel in the conference and in the post-conference summary report. We identify four factors shaping the realisation of teacher voice – repertoires, social position, topics and gatekeepers – and highlight paradoxes of teacher representation.