This article explores the administration of the teacher and teacher education from a critical governmentality perspective. It explores some of the current authorities and knowledges implicated in the governing of teachers, and how these characterise, connect to and operationalise a neo-liberal modality of government. A case study of the influential, school-based provider of teacher education in England, "Teach First", is drawn upon in order to investigate some of these relations of power as can be observed in a particular policy site and governmental encounter. In particular, the article investigates and critiques the increasingly popular (managerial) discourse of resilience inscribed into the Teach First "competencies and values". Resilience informs one of the pedagogical ends of the organisation's Leadership Development Programme, within which it is traded and exchanged as an approved capability. The article considers some of the wider implications of this discourse for the changing nature and value of knowledge in education, and in imagining and realising a more equitable present and future.