The Responsive Teacher Formation Framework (RTFF): Towards Teacher Belonging, Wellbeing, Autonomy and Agency in Primary Education

Teacher education systems globally experience a gap in implementation between policy aspirations and everyday enactment, with implications for initial teacher education (ITE), the quality of practicums, professional identity, and teacher recruitment and retention. Situated in Malta’s superdiverse context and informed by international debates on professional capital, care ethics, inclusion, and ecological conceptions of agency, this article introduces the Responsive Teacher Formation Framework (RTFF). This original, theoretically integrated, and empirically grounded framework foregrounds four interdependent pillars of professional formation: belonging, wellbeing, autonomy and agency. Drawing on a two-year, multi-strand national inquiry synthesising perspectives from children, families, newly qualified teachers, learning support educators, and school leaders, we integrated artefact-elicitation, focus groups, interviews, and questionnaires using reflexive thematic analysis and cross-strand configurational synthesis. Through a meta-synthesis convergence of the different strands of the study, recurrent tensions surface, including procedural versus lived belonging; attention versus neglect of wellbeing; nominal autonomy versus fragile system supports and policy endorsement versus constrained agency. The findings demonstrate how these complexities are experienced across the ITE–school interface. We argue that the RTFF offers a coherent and tractable syntax for ITE programme (re)design that is both theoretically robust and practically adaptable, diagnostically sensitive to local context, and implementable at scale. The model contributes to international discourse by linking fragmented debates on these four pillars into a responsive framework of, and for, teacher formation. Beyond the Maltese case, the RTFF offers an adaptable orientation for superdiverse settings seeking to transition from compliance-driven quality assurance to formation-centred professional excellence. The article concludes by outlining how the RTFF can anchor more integrated and sustainable policy, as well as nurture professional learning communities, thereby advancing the transformation of teacher education for academic excellence.