Within the rough ground that is the field of education there is a complex web of ethical obligations: to prepare our students for their future work; to be ethical as educators in our conduct and teaching; to the ethical principles embedded in the contexts in which we work; and given the Southern context of this work, the ethical obligations we have to this land and its First Peoples. We put out a call to colleagues whose work has been concerned with the pedagogies of professional ethics, the ethical burdens of institutional injustice, and the application of ethical theory to education’s applied fields. In the responses we received it can be seen that ethical concerns in education are broad ranging, covering terrain varying from the preparation of preservice teachers, ethics in higher education, early childhood and care, educational leadership, relational and communicative ethics. Perhaps it could also be argued that this paper demonstrates Gibbon’s observation that ‘Assumptions about the particularity of this time as new and ripe with opportunity to make a difference through philosophy of education are not new and there’s much to learn from the persistence of wanting to imagine that they are’ (in Peters et al., 2020 Peters, M. A. , Arndt, S. , Tesar, M. , Jackson, L. , Hung, R. , Mika, C. , Ozolins, J. T. , Teschers, C. , Orchard, J. , Buchanan, R. , Madjar, A. , Novak, R. , Besley, T. , Sturm, S. , Roberts, P. , & Gibbons, A (2020). Philosophy of education in a new key. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1759194 [Google Scholar] , p. 17). However, while the field of ethics is perennially concerned with human relations and pedagogical interventions to improve these, the responses collected here show that educational ethics is far from static. Educational ethics is a field that continues to develop in response to changing contexts.

Findings from the second phase of a study of pre-service teachers’ attitudes to environmental education and knowledge of climate change are reported in this paper. A sample of 87 pre-service teachers participated in a survey study in the last year of their Bachelor of Education degree to examine developments to their attitudes to environmental education and their knowledge of climate change as a result of training. Results showed their attitudes towards environmental education were consistently favourable, but their climate change science knowledge had not changed as a result of their participation in their degree. Data on preservice teachers’ sources of knowledge for climate change, their views on important substantive climate change knowledge for their future students and their perceptions of gaps in their own training in relation to climate change were also investigated in order to triangulate the survey data. Implications for preservice teacher education are discussed.

The achievement goals and parenting of a sample of 879 grade 8 – 10 Australian students were examined to distinguish differences between low‐ and high‐achieving students. Structural equation modelling was used to test a theoretical model linking parental warmth and strictness/supervision via mastery goals, self‐efficacy, and self‐handicapping to achievement. Results validated and extended previous findings concerning achievement goal theory, self‐efficacy, self‐handicapping and parenting style, supporting the role of self‐efficacy in mediating the effects of parental style through a mastery goal orientation to achievement. Low achievement was significantly linked to neglectful parenting perceptions, higher self‐handicapping and lower mastery goals and self‐efficacy. An authoritative parenting style was found to predict higher achievement via enhanced mastery goals and self‐efficacy while protecting against self‐handicapping.