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Policymakers and school leaders seek to improve the quality of teaching through curriculum innovations and professional development programmes, increasingly drawing on evidence-based approaches. For innovations involving teacher professional learning, a causal connection is posited between professional development activities, teacher engagement in them, changed practices and outcomes for learners. However, implementation and teachers’ engagement in professional development activity varies. Reasons for this include the influence of both the local and wider systemic environment in which the activity takes place and actors’ relationships to these environments. Currently, both environments and actors’ relationships are often shaped by performativity discourses and pressures. Typical implementation and process evaluation methodologies are limited by a focus on the easily measurable, often using tools that do not support fine-grained understanding of how actors’ situations, purposes and systemic influences, and the interrelationships between these, mediate and shape different degrees of participation. Developing more in-depth accounts are hindered by a relative lack of theorisation of context in relation to professional development. The paper uses a set of theoretical constructs to provide a stronger account of the variation and engagement in participation in such activity, with particular attention paid to the way school and teachers’ positioning within performativity systems influences participation. Constructs employed are teachers and schools’ positioning in terms of relative degrees of