Sharing Student Projects

Upper secondary education (USE) distinctively prepares students for the future through specialised and extended social-intrapersonal learning. Despite significance, USE research has often been subject-specific, student-centred, and outcome-based. To address these gaps, the present study compared teachers’ curriculum implementation experiences in two differing USE contexts: Senior High School (SHS) in the Philippines and A-Levels in the United Kingdom. Foregrounding the social cognitive theory’s agency framework and the ecological systems theory, the study explored how teachers navigate structural-cultural factors. Ten teachers were recruited (five from each context) and reflexive thematic analysis was used to analyse data from semi-structured interviews. Findings revealed that, considering their environments, teachers from both contexts enacted agency through student-centred principles. For SHS teachers, limited resources, heavy workloads, and ambitious curriculum standards urged personal agency—rooted in resourcefulness, moral duty, sensitivity to students’ needs, and Filipino identity. In contrast, A-Level teachers drew on organisational trust and collaboration, which supported collective agency despite pressures from the exam-oriented target culture and the limited staff and resources. Findings suggest that there remains a need to improve teachers’ experiences by bolstering structural supports shaping their practice, enabling deeper educational change across both systems. Demonstrating the importance of comprehensively inspecting USE contexts, this study informs curriculum design and implementation from USE systems’ context-specific understandings and cautious cross-system learning.

This study demonstrated how SHS and A-Level teachers navigate curriculum implementation through agency and external support. Although both contexts exhibited adaptability and resilience, pressures nevertheless arose from the conflicts between national objectives and classroom realities. Thus, the findings have implications for how the SHS and A-Levels systems can strengthen existing practices, improve on shortcomings, and learn from one another's approaches. Importantly, while cross-system learning is valuable, caution must be taken to prevent policy grafting by reciprocally adopting practices with contextual sensitivity based on a country’s culture, structure, and policies. Further research could investigate how cultural values can be systematically embedded into curriculum reform as needed in enriching students’ learning, probing how structural factors, particularly cases of SHS’s compliance with policy demands leading to “passed around students”, affect students’ transition and performance across education and SHS’s consequent programme success over time. For A-Levels, more studies could explore how collaborative and trust-based cultures are sufficient in mitigating exam pressure, or whether additional resource provision is needed, building on the difference noted between this study and Redmond et al. (2020). Moreover, comparative studies could examine whether incorporating societal values (i.e., SHS) and collaborative organisational cultures (i.e., A-Levels) yield similar benefits in other contexts or whether these strategies are deeply context-specific. Since this study employed inductive RTA, future research could expand with mixed methods research or larger samples in other school types (i.e., rural settings) and geographic settings.