Rationale

The primary reason for undertaking this study is because there is a paucity of research studies into moral injury in education. Although the volume of research being conducted into moral distress (teachers) and teacher demoralization is increasing, it is still mostly being carried out in western secular policy environments where ethical harm is conceptually understood through either psychological or organizational lenses [17]. There is little understanding of how moral injury occurs in educational environments where ethical responsibility is both a professional responsibility, as well as a cultural expectation, spiritual obligation and expectation. The Saudi educational system represents an increasingly theoretically important example of how teachers view transgression as both a professional violation and a rupturing of the spirit [18]. The rapid reforms of the Saudi educational system under Vision 2030 has thrown these newly transformed educational systems which have been “remade” by centrally mandated accountability systems, pacing systems, and performance – based evaluation of teacher performance into sharp relief [19]. However, this regime of governance of the very background forms of organization and responsibility that the above listed resemble so much the roll out of education reforms under neoliberalism internationally, the social conditions of the workplace of the teacher are utterly different because teaching as understood in traditional ways (Muraqib) as a form of moral stewardship and public (community) obligation.

The intersection of those two realities can be an experience of complicity in the demands of reform rather than technical readjustment and can be either an ethical betrayal or ethical harm, allowing moral injury to be a culturally mediated experience leading to systemic contradiction rather than the vulnerability of individual teacher. Recent studies conducted on the national level suggest that many teachers in Saudi Arabia are becoming burnt out, primarily in the areas of the demands for integrating inclusive education and digitalization of curriculum. But teachers’ experiences cannot be accounted for in isolation by burnout experiences. Many teachers describe their experience as a phenomenon of a disruption of their sense of identity, spiritual conflict and ethical betrayal. Therefore, our aim is to take beyond the current research that is limited to a deficit-based model of how the wellbeing of teachers and explore the ethics-structural dimensions of teacher distress in the context of educational reforms can be restored. This qualitative study used interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to allow for an examination of teachers’ sense-making, reflection and internalization of ethical dilemmas in their lives. To gain insights on how the policies enacting educational reform are interpreted and acted upon in local communities, data was collected from a national sample of Saudi educators recruited across multiple regions of the Kingdom, with three primary anchor sites in Riyadh, Jeddah and Abha, to obtain a holistic view on the dynamics of how the educational reforms are taking place at different ecological levels of implementation in terms of central authority and community embeddedness. This multi-site analysis provides an ecological framework for this research in terms of the varying dynamics of how teachers, school, and community mediate the effects of an educational reform, set within the local sociocultural or environmental context. By situating the issue of moral injury within the interplay of policy, institution and classroom environment, this research contributed to an ecological understanding of ethical harm within education and expanded literature related to moral injury to non-Western based education reform systems.

Theoretical framework

The approach of this article combines moral injury theory and Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems framework to view and understand teachers’ ethical distress as a process occurring within a system and through development rather than as an individual psychological shortcoming. Moral injury refers to psychological and spiritual harm that occurs when individuals are compelled to act against deeply held moral commitments or experience institutional betrayal of professional values [10,11].

In educational settings, this harm often arises when bureaucratic requirements constrain ethical pedagogy and relational responsibility [9,13,20]. While theoretically useful in addressing the internal experience of ethical transgression, the theory is silent about how structures create this distress; Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory fills this in by modelling how macrolevel policies are operationalized through layers of institutional structure to experience as classroom conditions.

By integrating these two theories, this study develops an interpretive ecological framing of moral injury where ethical harm emerges from a three-stage process. First is translation, a process where national reform agendas become converted into the institutions’ expectations, performance indicators, and compliance routines (macrosystem to exosystem). Second is a collision where these demands enter the classroom microsystem, conflicting with educators’ moral, values-based pedagogical and relational commitments, including Islamic precepts of care, justice, and moral stewardship that govern teacher-student relations. The third stage of internalization comes with repeated experiences of ethical compromise that become psychologically and spiritually internalized as moral injury (betrayal, fragmented self, loss of professional meaning). In this context, burnout is understood not as the etiology of moral injury but rather as a strain response to the moral-structural work of the reform system.

To clarify the status of this model: it is presented here as a theoretically informed framework that was refined iteratively against participants’ narratives rather than as a hypothesis tested against pre-specified measures. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological layers and Litz et al. [10] moral injury components functioned as sensitizing concepts during idiographic analysis; the three processual stages, Translation, Collision, and Internalization, emerged abductively as the most parsimonious account of how macrosystem reform demands become phenomenologically registered as moral injury in participants’ accounts. Translation denotes the institutional conversion of macrosystem policy (Vision 2030, global accountability ideology) into exosystemic demands on teachers, Ministry directives, inspection cycles, Key Performance Indicator frameworks, and pacing mandates. Collision denotes the encounter, at the microsystem of the classroom, between these translated demands and teachers’ culturally and religiously grounded pedagogical commitments (compassionate care: ‘Ra’hmah’; justice: ‘Adl’; moral stewardship: ‘Muraqib’). Internalisation denotes the individual teacher’s phenomenological registration of repeated collisions as moral injury, shame, guilt, ethical betrayal, and fragmentation of professional identity, moderated across the chronosystem by career stage.

The model also accounts for the variation across career stages (chronosystem). Early career teachers with less institutional power and professional capacitation may experience moral injury as deep, acute insecurity in their identity and role, whereas veteran teachers may cope in more adaptive but ethically costly ways, e.g., as compartmentalizer or two-faced. Effects of chronosystem thus moderate the experience and expression of moral injury. This integrated framework inputs into guiding research questions and analytic strategy and technique by tying the politics of reform systems into the lived ethical experience.

Fig 1 highlights a three-stage process where education reform agendas and accountability ideology (macrosystem) are operationalized through Ministry directives, inspection regimes, and performance indicators (exosystem), creating classroom conditions of time pressure and reduced relational care (microsystem), and ultimately internalised as moral injury at the individual level, with chronosystem accounting for age differences in experience and expression between novice and veteran teachers.

Download:

• PNG
  larger image
• TIFF
  original image

Fig 1. The interpretive ecological moral injury framework.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0356254.g001

Through the evaluation of alternative theoretical lenses in relation to the contextualisation of the framework selection process, both organisational stress and job demands–resources [21] effectively explain resource depletion processes; however, they do not incorporate the ethical-identity rupture that participants described. Role conflict theory identifies structural incompatibility of roles but does not address the moral components of that incompatibility. Self-determination theory discusses loss of autonomy; however, it does not provide context for the sacred and/or religious basis for the pedagogical commitment in Islamic educational settings. Moral injury theory was retained as the primary lens as it alone highlights the transgressional nature of the ethical interaction and the spiritual aspects of the harm caused. The ecological framework was added to mitigate the lack of moral injury theory’s attention towards the structural causes of these types of interactions.

Research questions

This research study addressed three main research questions:

1. How do Saudi educators experience and interpret moral injury within the context of Vision 2030 educational reforms?
2. How do institutional, cultural, and systemic conditions contribute to educators’ experiences of moral conflict and ethical dissonance?
3. How do teachers navigate, negotiate, or resist ethical tensions generated by reform-related accountability demands across different career stages?

Literature review

1. Conceptual Foundations of Moral Injury in Education

Moral injury originated in military psychology and referred to psychological and spiritual distress resulting from actions, or inaction, that violate deeply held moral beliefs [10,11]. This construct has since been applied to health, social work, and educational settings, where professionals may suffer harm when institutional imperatives diverge from moral obligations to student-centred care [13,22]. In education, moral injury emerges from pressuring teachers into compliance with policies that violate pedagogy and child welfare, resulting in resentment and betrayal, accountability demands, and rupture of professional and social identity [7].

While burnout is essentially an expression of exhaustion and depersonalisation from exposure to excessive labour over time, moral injury is predicated upon violation and dissonance of value [23,24]. It is through this lens that educators were recruited in a study of distress under reform in Saudi Arabia, treating their suffering not as fatigue or overwork but as conflict over constrained moral agency.

1. 2. Global Research on Teacher Moral Distress and Reform

Internationally, accountability driven reforms in systems also emphasising high stakes testing, performance monitoring, and datafication have been linked to moral distress amongst teachers [25]. Santoro [13] has coined the term teacher demoralization to make the case for educators leaving the profession not because of heavy workload per se but because they are prevented from doing the things they know are morally right. Empirical studies in Australia and the UK and France similarly identify institutional betrayal and ethical compromise as drivers of professional disillusionment [9,26,27]. However, generally the literature has its origins in secular western policy environments, so less attention has been paid to the implications of moral injury in educational systems in which teachers work within denser religious and community ethics, which creates a significant gap in moral injury scholarship.

1. 3. Gaps in Non-Western Educational Contexts

Research on education in the Middle East has historically neglected to tease out the ethical and spiritual aspects of teaching as a practice under reform [28], opting instead to frame pedagogical practice predominantly in terms of structural conditions like salaries, facilities, and professional development. However, in many Arab contexts teaching is socially constructed simultaneously as a profession and as a moral vocation, drawing on religious ideas of stewardship (Muraqib) and the principle of communal responsibility. As a result, the omission of moral analysis from reform research leaves unexplained how teachers come to experience moral conflict within religious systems of knowledge. This gap is particularly salient for fast reforming societies like Saudi Arabia, where global accountability models are rapidly grafted onto traditions resting on bedrocks of values.

1. 4. Vision 2030 and the Saudi Educational Reform Landscape

Vision 2030 reforms have encompassed curriculum modernization, digitization, standardization, assessment, English as the medium of instruction, closer university-business connections, and educational -labour market alignment [29,30], are inspired by neoliberal governance logics of efficiency, productivity, evaluation, and accountability in terms of results and outcomes. Teachers are to be governed through key performance indicators (KPIs) related to test results, attendance, and pacing in curriculum coverage [31]. The early research record suggests increasing professional anxiety associated with a growing inspection regime and anxieties around “failure” of compliance within imposed hierarchical structures [32]. Within this changing ethically fraught context of education it may be harder to exercise pedagogical discretion and offer loving relational care, creating ethical dilemmas for educators in the minutiae of everyday classroom life.

1. 5. Theoretical Anchoring: Moral Injury Meets Ecological Systems

Moral Injury Theory explains how the individual sees themselves after inflicting ethical harm on others or potentially being harmed by others and provides the basic premise for understanding Ecological Systems Theory [33,34]. When used in concert, both frameworks provide clear insights regarding the macro-level reform agenda, and how that macro-level reform agenda is translated to teachers at the school-level through exosystemic institutions, such as the workplace, which creates the very system of ethical tension teachers experience every day [33,34].

This integrated perspective enables analysis of how systemic accountability reforms may erode teachers’ moral agency and professional identity over time, particularly within culturally and religiously grounded educational contexts. By situating moral injury within interacting ecological layers, the present study offers a structurally grounded explanation of ethical distress rather than attributing teacher suffering to individual resilience deficits.

To clarify the conceptual progression and thematic coverage of the literature review, Table 1 summarizes the major sections, focal constructs, and representative sources that informed the theoretical and empirical foundations of this study.

Download:

• PNG
  larger image
• TIFF
  original image

Table 1. Structure of the literature review.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0356254.t001

Research design and conceptual framework

This study employed an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) design to examine how Saudi educators experience and interpret moral injury and burnout within the context of Vision 2030 reforms. IPA is grounded in Heideggerian phenomenology and is concerned with how individuals make sense of emotionally complex and ethically charged experiences [41,42]. Given that moral injury involves violations of deeply held moral commitments rather than observable behaviors alone, an interpretive phenomenological approach is methodologically appropriate for examining how educators understand, narrate, and respond to ethical conflict in their professional lives. IPA values idiographic richness over statistical typicality, so prioritizes depth of understanding lived experience over generalisation. As such, teachers’ narratives are foregrounded as testimony to understandings of the impacts of reform, in contestation of officially sanctioned accounts of educational change. IPA was selected specifically because its three epistemological commitments, phenomenology (lived experience as the object of inquiry), hermeneutics (interpretation of participant meaning-making), and idiography (priority to the particular case before cross-case patterning), directly fit the analytic demands of studying moral injury, which is constitutively about how individuals interpret and narrate transgressive ethical events within their particular cultural worlds [43,44]. The final sample of N = 25 sits at the upper end of the range recommended for IPA doctoral and professional studies [44,45], chosen deliberately to permit cross-case thematic patterning across three contrasting regions while preserving idiographic depth within each case.

Research setting and participants

Data were collected from a national sample of Saudi public-school teachers recruited across multiple regions of the Kingdom. Three primary anchor sites: Riyadh, Jeddah and Abha, provided the initial recruitment access points and represent the three contrasting reform ecologies that frame the analysis. These three anchor sites were purposively selected on theoretical rather than purely geographic grounds, to capture variation in administrative intensity, urban diversity, and community-embedded schooling context. Snowball sampling extended recruitment from each anchor site to surrounding and additional regions, producing a national sample that captures the wider geographic and institutional diversity of Saudi public education under Vision 2030 (see Table 2 for the full geographic distribution; detailed participant characteristics are provided in S1 Table). Participants were Saudi public-school teachers (N = 25) teaching in intermediate and secondary schools, both male and female, across a range of subjects. 32 teachers were approached; seven were eliminated due to incomplete interviews or withdrawal and/or enrolment prior to interview completion, yielding a final analytic sample of 25 participants. Each interview was uniformly transcribed verbatim, and rich idiographic analyses were conducted in parallel across cases as guided by IPA [46]. The sample size was chosen in such a way as to allow for in-depth idiographic ‘diving in’, while still leveraging the potential for richer cross case thematic pattering. Teachers were approached using maximum variation sampling for maximal diversity across gender, career stage (novice, mid-career, veteran), school type (boys’ and girls’ schools; urban and semi-urban) and subject specialization (notably English, science and Islamic studies). Sample recruitment was accomplished by networking with teachers, professional networks, school supervisors, and social networking snowball sampling. Maximum variation sampling was applied deliberately to counteract the clustering that recruitment through professional networks and snowball referral can introduce, recognising that this strategy mitigates rather than eliminates the tendency toward a socially and professionally connected sample. The three regions were selected as anchor sites on theoretical rather than purely geographical grounds, to capture variation in the ecology of reform implementation. Riyadh, as the administrative and political capital, was selected to represent the site of highest-intensity contact with Ministry oversight, inspection regimes, and KPI-driven accountability. Jeddah, as a cosmopolitan coastal metropolis with dense international and private-sector educational influence, was selected to represent urban-diverse reform ecology where global accountability logics meet pluralistic student populations. Abha, as a peripheral region with more strongly community-embedded schooling and stronger continuity with traditional religious-pedagogical practice, was selected to represent reform ecology at greater distance from central administrative intensity. Snowball sampling from each of these anchor sites extended recruitment to additional regions across the Kingdom, allowing the analysis to engage with how a single macrosystem policy is differentially translated and phenomenologically experienced under contrasting institutional-ecological conditions throughout Saudi Arabia.

Download:

• PNG
  larger image
• TIFF
  original image

Table 2. Summary of Emergent Themes from Participant Narratives.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0356254.t002

Data collection

Primary data were obtained through semi-structured in-depth interviews (60–90 min) in-person or via a secure online video tool based on participant location and preference. Interviews were conducted in Arabic or English, depending on participant comfort; transcripts in Arabic were translated and re-checked for conceptual fidelity. Questions explored experiences of ethical conflict, institutions’ pressures, emotional responses to reform, and perceived sources of support. In addition, a small number of participant (n = 10) completed brief reflective journals to capture recurring ethical dilemmas and emotional dilemmas across their daily practice over two weeks; reflections were only used to help situate the interview data, rather than as analytic units in their own right.

Translation and conceptual equivalence

Arabic-language interviews were transcribed verbatim by a bilingual Saudi research assistant and then independently forward-translated into English by the lead researcher. A second bilingual academic with linguistic and educational research expertise back-translated a 20% sample of the translated transcripts into Arabic; discrepancies were resolved through iterative discussion with attention to connotative and culturally specific terminology (for example, the religious semantic fields of ‘Muraqib’, ‘Amanah’, and ‘Rahmah’, which do not map cleanly to single English terms). Culturally embedded concepts were retained in transliterated Arabic in the final analytic transcripts with interpretive glosses, to preserve phenomenological specificity and reduce the risk of meaning loss in translation.

Data analysis

Data were analysed according to IPA approaches [42]. Transcripts were read multiple times to get a sense of emotional tenor and narrative arc. Exploratory notes were generated. Themes were then generated both within case, and across all cases, to attend to shared felt-meanings while retaining idiographic specificity. Inductive coding addressed emergent concepts present in participants’ narratives. Sensitizing concepts from the interview literature on moral injury, including betrayal, moral dissonance, and systemic coercion, informed the analyses but did not pre-specify coding categories. These sensitizing frameworks served as a tool for interpretation, but no categories were defined in advance, with themes being developed from the participants themselves. Serial re-readings of transcripts were done to attend to tone, narrative arc, and culturally patterned language. Exploratory notes were created at three “levels”: descriptive (what is actually said), linguistic (how it is said), and conceptual (what it might indicate); with particular attention to instances where institutional expectations potentially transgressed teachers’ professional and moral commitments. Emergent themes were developed within-case before patterning across cases. Coding was done in such a way as to marry inductive emergence into themes from participants’ accounts with theoretically sensitized attention to concepts from the literature on moral injury such as ideas of betrayal, moral dissonance, constrained agency. Analysis proceeded through the six-stage protocol articulated by Smith, Flowers and Larkin [43] and subsequently elaborated by Pietkiewicz and Smith [44] and Larkin et al. [42]: (1) multiple immersive readings of each transcript to grasp narrative arc and emotional tenor; (2) three-level exploratory noting (descriptive, linguistic, conceptual) in the transcript margins, with particular attention to moments where institutional demand appeared to transgress professional or moral commitment; (3) development of emergent themes from these notes, staying close to participant language; (4) searching for connections among emergent themes within each case to generate a structured set of super-ordinate themes; (5) repetition of stages 1–4 for each remaining case, preserving idiographic priority and guarding against premature cross-case imposition; and (6) cross-case patterning to identify shared super-ordinate themes while retaining individual variation. Sensitizing concepts drawn from the moral injury literature, betrayal, moral dissonance, constrained agency informed interpretation at stages 2 and 3 without pre-specifying coding categories.

Trustworthiness and rigor

To enhance reliability and trustworthiness, multiple strategies were utilized. Participant feedback was obtained through member checking when the participants were given opportunities to read excerpts from selected transcripts and provide initial comments regarding the interpretation of those excerpts. The use of a bilingual academic peer for debriefing sessions facilitated an increase in reflexivity and analytical credibility with regards to the Saudi Arabian context. The researcher established an audit trail for tracking analytical decisions and developing themes; additionally, the researcher maintained a reflexive journal throughout the analysis to explore their positionality and emotional reaction at different points throughout the study. Rigor was operationalized explicitly against Lincoln and Guba’s [47] four criteria. Credibility was supported through prolonged engagement with participants (60–90 minute interviews with follow-up clarification where needed), member-checking of selected interpretive excerpts by ten participants, and peer debriefing with a bilingual academic familiar with the Saudi educational context. Dependability was supported through an analytic audit trail documenting each decision from raw transcript to final super-ordinate theme, retained under the institutional data-governance arrangements described in the Data Availability Statement. Confirmability was supported through the researcher’s reflexive journal, in which positionality, emotional reactions during analysis, and potentially biasing commitments were recorded and revisited at the theme-consolidation stage. Transferability is addressed through thick contextual description of the three anchor research settings, of the wider regional spread of the sample, and of each participant, inviting readers to assess analytic fit to their own contexts rather than relying on statistical generalization.

Ethical considerations

Ethics approval was granted by the Research Unit at the English Language Institute, King Abdulaziz University (IRB #2025-EDU-201, approved 25 April 2025), before data collection commenced. All participants consented to having been provided with a description of the purpose of the study, how confidentiality would be maintained, and their ability to withdraw from the study without penalty, both orally and in writing prior to commencing their participation. De-identified data are stored securely on encrypted, password-protected institutional systems and may be accessed only through the controlled institutional process described in the Data Availability Statement. Given the sensitive nature of ethical reflection, interviews were conducted using trauma-informed practices, and participants were free to pause or terminate interviews at any time.

Limitations

As an idiographic qualitative study, findings are not intended to be statistically generalizable but are offered for analytical transferability through contextualized description. Cultural norms surrounding emotional expression may have influenced the degree of disclosure among some participants. In addition, the study reflects educators’ perspectives without parallel institutional viewpoints and therefore captures only part of the broader reform ecology influencing teacher wellbeing. There are five key limitations of the study that should be defined as such. The first limitation is that the findings presented are based only on teacher’s perspectives. Therefore, access was not available to the perspectives of Ministry officials, school administrators and reform architects who might have provided added context to the moral injury framing in some circumstances. The second is the fact that the sample, although drawn from multiple regions across Saudi Arabia and anchored in three primary sites (Riyadh, Jeddah, and Abha) selected on theoretical grounds, does not claim full representational coverage of the Kingdom; the findings may not apply uniformly to all regions or to private-sector schooling. Third, the possibility that the ethical nature of the interviews selected for participants who were already experiencing some level of distress, led to salience bias and increased the chance of participants presenting negative frames, should be highlighted, as this study does not claim to be representative of the entire population as to how the reforms were experienced. Fourth, while it is not disputed that these reforms may provide wider access to higher levels of technology, improved employability for graduates and an increase in the level of international comparison between the Saudi systems, the findings of the moral injury should not be used to form an overall judgement on the success of the reforms and to represent a specific, mitigable cost associated with the implementation of these reforms. Fifth, because recruitment proceeded through professional networks and snowball referral from the three anchor sites, the sample is likely to over-represent teachers who are socially and professionally connected and who may share broadly similar dispositions toward the reforms, which introduces a risk of homogeneity and selection bias; this recruitment route may have shaped the range of experiences captured, for example by drawing in educators already disposed to articulate ethical distress, and the maximum variation strategy described in the Methods can only partially offset this tendency.

Data analyses and results

Exosystem pressures: institutional translation of reform

Informants routinely described these reform pressures emerging not so much through direct contact with national policy texts but rather through institutional experience of ministry missives, the inspection cycle, and performance management: “It’s more through the experienced pressures and routines we go through rather than the policy documents we actually read sometimes” (Maha). As these exosystemic structures translate macrolevel reform agendas into daily expectations of compliance, they produce intensifications of surveillance, documentation burden, and constraints on authentic instructional practice. Ahmed describes how conversion of time assigned to moral instruction to assessment preparation is “like sacrificing the soul of education”. Read closely at the level of language, these two accounts disclose how the exosystem is encountered phenomenologically rather than textually. Maha locates reform not in the documents she reads but in the routines she lives, so that policy is felt as atmosphere and habituated obligation before it is ever cognitively engaged. Ahmed’s choice of the verb sacrificing, drawn from a religious register, reframes what the institution presents as a neutral reallocation of instructional time as the loss of something he regards as central to teaching. At the conceptual level, this is the point at which moral injury originates for these participants: an institutional efficiency is experienced as acting against a deeply held value, with the teacher positioned as the one required to enact it.

Microsystem conflict: classroom-level ethical dissonance

The demands of institutions were most directly felt through classroom encounters where teachers contended with time constraints, curriculum pacing mandates, and challenges to their relational capacity. Teachers described feeling forced to prioritize test preparation and compliance above individual student support and how these practices produced ethical discomfort and personal betrayal of the teacher identity they wished to enact. These microsystem-level “hot spots” of moral tension surfaced as the central sites of moral dilemmas. A handful of teachers talked about ‘practicing’ the things they found themselves doing in classrooms that provoked a sense of moral conflict in their disposition toward students. “I’m betraying them.... Even maintaining an 85% performance, regardless of where they are, that’s betraying them” (Fatimah). Fatimah’s words repay close interpretive attention. Her repeated use of the word betraying, and her placement of herself in the first person as the agent of that betrayal rather than its object, indicate that the moral wound here is one of perceived perpetration rather than of harm suffered at the hands of others. The precise figure of an eighty-five per cent performance target is itself telling, since the metric becomes the very instrument through which she is made to betray students whose needs she continues to perceive clearly. At the conceptual level, the classroom emerges not merely as a site of strain but as the place where a teacher is conscripted into acting against her own ethical commitments, which is the distinctive structure of moral injury as distinct from ordinary occupational stress.

Individual internalization: moral injury and burnout

Repeated exposure to unresolved ethical conflict was embodied as emotional and identity-related distress. Participants described experiences of feeling betrayed morally, harming an experience of professional day’s work, and suffering a sense of diminished worth. For these participants, burnout was bound up with unresolved moral conflict rather than arising simply from depleted resources, so that moral injury is best understood as an injury to the ethical self. Layan, a science teacher, captured this erosion when she described moving from “sparking curiosity”, to a “data technician,” and then on medical leave every year due to anxiety. Layan’s two images map a single trajectory of identity loss. The first, sparking curiosity, names a generative and relational vocation in which teaching ignites something in another person; the second, data technician, names a mechanical and depersonalised function in which the teacher merely processes outputs. That she narrates the latter as what she has become, and that the cost recurs in her body as annual medical leave, shows how the ethical conflict described above does not remain situational but settles into a revised understanding of who she is. This is the point at which systemic pressure is fully internalised as moral injury, no longer an external demand but a change in the self.

Chronosystem differences: career stage and coping patterns

Experiences of moral injury differed at each stage of participants’ careers. Early career teachers were more likely to describe anxiety, fear of non-compliance, or confusion about their professional identity. Veteran teachers were more likely to find ways to accommodate their work, express detachment or metaphorical compartmentalization as a way to remain in their jobs while minimizing the ethical distress. These two chronosystem strands suggest that a teacher’s career stage influences his/her susceptibility to moral injury and also suggests that veteran teachers speak more of adaptive but ethically ambiguous strategies to cope. One senior Arabic teacher described “performing compliance” for inspectors and trying to continue to play the authentic teaching role on his own time, a necessary strategy that he also found shameful (Salman). In contrast, early-career teachers described immediate psychological vulnerability. One novice teacher entering the profession during reform implementation reported panic attacks related to KPI expectations and feelings of institutional disposability (Noura). The contrast between these two cases is itself analytically revealing. Salman’s phrase performing compliance casts his working life in dramaturgical terms, splitting the self into a compliant public performance staged for inspectors and an authentic practice reserved for his own time. That he describes this division as shameful indicates that the strategy does not resolve the moral conflict so much as relocate it inward, so that veteran adaptation is better read as a managed and ongoing wound than as recovery. Noura, by contrast, has no comparable private space into which to retreat; her panic attacks and her sense of institutional disposability show the injury in its acute and bodily form, before the career-long strategies of compartmentalisation that Salman has built up are available to her. Read together, the two accounts suggest that career stage shapes not whether moral injury is experienced but the form its concealment or expression takes.

Descriptive patterns of thematic salience

Across the 25 cases, the super-ordinate themes differed in salience, understood here as the combination of how widely a theme recurred across participants and how centrally it featured within individual accounts. Some themes were pervasive, surfacing in most narratives and often articulated with considerable depth, while others, though clearly present, appeared in fewer accounts or with less emphasis. This patterning was established interpretively through the idiographic analysis rather than through any numerical index, and the qualitative descriptions that follow convey the relative prominence of each theme without reducing it to a score.

Summary of results in relation to the ecological model

Collectively, findings are broadly consistent with the proposed ecological moral injury framework, which is advanced here as an interpretive and heuristic account derived abductively from a small purposive sample rather than as an empirically validated or generalizable model, in which macro-level reform agendas are translated through institutional mechanisms, enacted through classroom constraints, and internalized as ethical and identity-related harm. Participants’ narratives illustrate how systemic governance structures shape moral experience, supporting the interpretation that moral injury among educators is structurally produced rather than individually generated.

Interpretive Insight

From the data emerged several themes across cases: (1) moral dissonance from policies; (2) spiritual dilemmas and loss of integrity as a teacher; (3) emotional exhaustion and burnout; (4) decreased autonomy; and (5) disconnection with the leaders of the organization. These themes bring to light systemic ethical tensions related to the implementation of Vision 2030.

From reform agents to moral subjects

Participants’ accounts reflect a shift from being positioned as professional reform agents to becoming moral subjects navigating ethical compromise. Educators described feeling betrayed not by individuals but by institutional structures that prioritize compliance over care, consistent with international findings that link accountability regimes to teacher demoralisation rather than burnout alone [7,13]. This experience was further heightened through cultural and religious context in Saudi Arabia. Teachers experienced professional frustrations and spiritual and ethical ruptures when institutional mandates conflicted with the Islamic principles of justice, equity, and mercy, which are utilized in teaching as a form of moral stewardship.

In addition, Islamic Studies and Arabic language teachers expressed being forced to put more emphasis on assessment preparation than on the development of reflective and values-based learning, which detracted from the ethical intent of their teaching. In kind, teachers of English and science in under-resourced classroom settings reported experiencing moral conflict wherein the use of standardized curricula did not match their students’ academic or linguistic readiness. Across all cases, educators expressed feeling complicit in the educational harm, experiences which parallel key characteristics of moral injury.

Curriculum rigidity and datafication

Participants frequently described experiencing data-driven accountability as transforming teaching into a form of labour increasingly organised around metrics and compliance, which they articulated in terms that resonate with accounts of neoliberal governance’s appropriation of professional judgement into a technical compliance standard [49]. Teachers’ description of themselves as “data technicians” instead of educators conveyed a sense that their professional agency and the ethical relationships they held with their students had eroded. While some teachers have adapted their teaching in covert ways in order to superficially satisfy the requirements for compliance, they continue to actually teach in a way that is authentic within the context of their practice. These covert means of adaptation and compliance have an ethical cost that perpetuates distrust of institutions and moral compromises, rather than addressing the systemic tensions arising from this relationship between teaching and data-driven accountability.

Chronosystem effects and differential vulnerability

Career-stage differences observed in this study are consistent with extending the interpretive framework to include the chronosystem. Early career teachers reported acute anxiety, identity instability, and doubts about professional longevity, compounded by limited mentorship and institutional support. Veteran teachers more often employed coping strategies such as compartmentalization and selective compliance, which reduced immediate psychological distress but did not eliminate ethical conflict. These findings suggest that professional experience moderates exposure and response to moral injury but does not shield educators from its structural origins. Differentiated support mechanisms may therefore be valuable, particularly for novice teachers lacking institutional capital and reflective professional networks.

Institutional empathy and moral voice

A pervasive absence of institutional empathy emerged across participant accounts. Teachers described limited opportunities to express ethical concerns or participate meaningfully in reform discourse, reinforcing perceptions of disposability and institutional betrayal. International research highlights that teacher wellbeing is closely tied to perceived fairness, participatory governance, and alignment between institutional and personal values [50]. In the Saudi reform context, opaque decision-making processes and rigid implementation pathways appear to have generated a trust deficit, intensifying moral disengagement and attrition risk.

Implications for policy and professional practice

The findings suggest that sustainable reform requires attention not only to instructional outcomes but also to educators’ moral and relational realities. The recommendations set out in this section are interpretive proposals that extend beyond the study’s empirical findings; they are offered provisionally, in light of the limitations noted above, rather than as conclusions established by the data. If Vision 2030 seeks to balance global competitiveness with cultural integrity, reform design must incorporate ethical responsiveness alongside performance accountability. The primary practical implications of the study can be addressed through five specific, implementable actions: (1) ethical-impact assessment of new KPI and pacing policies prior to their implementation, analogous to health-impact assessment in public policy; (2) formalised protected spaces for the expression of teacher ethical voice as part of school governance, for example through the establishment of a standing pedagogical ethics committee with substantive advisory authority; (3) moral-injury awareness training for school leaders and inspection personnel to help them recognise and avoid inflicting ethical harm on teachers; (4) differentiated mentorship structures designed to address the unique needs of early-career teachers identified in this study; and (5) redesigned accountability indicators that incorporate the ethical and relational quality of the institution, for example, teacher perceptions of alignment between institutional practice and religious/pedagogical values, alongside test-performance metrics.

Recognizing moral injury as a systemic rather than individual phenomenon shifts reform responsibility from teacher resilience toward institutional design. For many participants in this study, educational transformation was experienced not solely as infrastructural or curricular change but as a morally consequential process. Without ethical alignment between policy and practice, reform risks undermining the very professional commitment it seeks to mobilise.