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This study examines how code of conduct (CoC) policiesFootnote1 function within Australia’s marketised vocational education and training sector, revealing fundamental contradictions in their implementation as instruments of neoliberal governance rather than for ethical guidance. While ostensibly designed to regulate professional behaviour across all employment categories (from teaching staff to administrative personnel, including casual and contract workers), these regulatory frameworks function primarily as mechanisms of institutional control and risk management. Drawing on Bernstein’s concepts of policy recontextualisation and pedagogic discourse, we investigate how CoC policies for teachers are implemented to create ‘ethical impossibility’: structural conditions where adherence to official ethical policies becomes antithetical to ethical practice. Through interpretative phenomenological analysis of semi-structured interviews with 19 teachers from public and private vocational education and training institutions across three Australian states, we examine how teachers navigate ethical dilemmas. Our analysis reveals how recontextualisation establishes strong symbolic boundaries between collective professional ethical discourse and situated educational practice, thus constraining teachers’ contextual ethical reasoning. Rather than guiding professional ethical decision-making, these policy instruments individualise collective ethical responsibilities, forcing teachers to develop ‘ethical resilience’: maintaining professional integrity under structural constraints. Findings reveal how competitive funding and performance-driven accountability create conditions where teachers must choose between institutional survival and ethical practices. We conclude that effective ethical practice requires reconceptualising CoC policies as collective social practices rather than as individualised regulatory mechanisms of regulation and control.
Nakar et al. (Mon,) studied this question.
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