ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a way of thinking about teacher professionalism that may be considered as fundamental to 'flipping the system'. Teachers must organise, and unions provide the vehicle for that – independent, democratic and inclusive. When teachers organise and engage with their unions to assert their collective agency, flipping the system shifts from possibility to reality. There may be a language of autonomy, but the reality is very different, with decentralisation often used as a smoke screen to break up a public system and hand assets to the private sector. Teacher unions are not the only bodies that need to be involved in 'flipping the system', but teachers must recognise there can be no flipping the system without them. If teachers want to flip the system, then they must flip it themselves. Even teachers' own learning becomes instrumental and target focused.
