A teacher’s preparedness to deliver quality pastoral care presents an ongoing challenge for teacher education institutions. It also presents a similar challenge for teachers and pre-service teachers who work in school boarding house contexts. The expectations and requirements of what pastoral care involves is ever shifting in response to the evolving challenges faced by students and staff alike. There are diverse interpretations and sometimes conflicting understandings of what pastoral care in education contexts involves. This ambiguity can have implications for how teachers are prepared to provide appropriate and quality pastoral care post initial teacher education.

This paper explores the perceptions and experiences of what constitutes pastoral care from the perspectives of staff that are teachers (pre-service and in-service) working in a Tasmanian boarding school context. Using narrative analysis, the implications of professional learning opportunities in place and inherent to working in a residential-education context are elucidated. In doing so, the challenges and benefits of being/becoming a teacher in a residential-education context emerge, and the implications of the nexus between perception and enactment of pastoral care in this space is articulated.