Teachers are burdened by short-sighted education policies, commercialisation, bureaucratisation, increasing teacher workloads and mechanistic accountabilities. The media presents polarising perspectives of the teaching profession and the tacit knowledge and experience of teachers is often devalued. Too much education reform remains top-down, imposed on schools without drawing on or supporting the development of capacities within the system. The Flip the System education movement began as an antidote to corporatism and rigid one-dimensional compliance, and a cry for democracy.

At its core, the Flip the System movement is about teacher agency – empowering teachers to shape our profession, democratising education, replacing top-down accountability with teacher-led reform, and elevating the voices of those working in schools to such a level that their influence cannot go unnoticed. Flipping the system is about shifting the narrative to one of trust and agency, subverting hierarchies and reforming from the bottom up, and listening closely to the people within the system. It is about resisting over-simplified solutions and polarising discourses, and instead about coming together, standing together, speaking together and acting together.