When qualifying as a secondary school physics teacher in England, the statutory guidance is generic and very little subject-specific detail is offered. There is a lack of a clear, shared understanding of the subject-specific attributes that newly-qualified physics teachers are expected to have. This exploratory study reports the findings of a questionnaire that asked various stakeholders—including physics teachers, trainees and teacher trainers—to identify what they regard as the attributes of a ‘good’ physics teacher. From our analysis we present a set of attributes of a good physics teacher and consider how these may be grouped into themes that could provide a way to explore these expectations. We pay particular attention to the subject-specific, and consider how our findings align with the existing literature base.