Teacher agency in student learning outcomes–based curriculum reform: perspectives from federal and provincial secondary schools in Pakistan

International education research foregrounds the contextual and relational dimensions of educational change, shaped by global and local policy pressures and structural constraints (Bromley & Meyer, 2023). Drawing on this perspective, this paper uses the ecological model of teacher agency (Priestley et al., 2015) and policy enactment theory (Ball et al., 2012) to examine public secondary school teachers' agency in the enactment of Student Learning Outcomes (SLO)-oriented reform in Pakistan's resource-constrained context. The study adopts an exploratory qualitative design and thematically analyses data from 67 in-depth interviews with Mathematics and English public secondary school teachers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Islamabad Capital Territory, Pakistan. Rather than treating comparison as a methodological device, the paper engages with the process of change itself, a process in which teachers continually compare current practice with what the reform intends it to become in order to enact it. The findings indicate that teachers' enactment of SLO-oriented reforms is shaped by persistent, systemic and classroom-level realities, and demonstrates individual resilience within constrained conditions. By situating teachers' experiences within global-local policy dynamics, and across two differently resourced sites, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on teacher agency and policy enactment in resource-constrained settings.