A number of school initiatives aimed at making teaching more appealing to Gen Z have made waves recently.

From flexi-time offerings at All Saints Catholic College in London to the nine-day fortnight now implemented at Dixons Academy Trust, the conversation around flexible working in education is exciting.

Announcements regarding three new studies to back up education secretary Bridget Phillipson’s support for off-site planning, preparation and assessment, to measure the impact of innovations at Dixons, and to explore whether flexible working for staff can help pupils in our most vulnerable schools will add welcome new research to push forward with helpful policy decisions.

Recruitment fixation ignores retention woes

Now, a new Teach First report Tomorrow’s Teachers once again talks about the power of flexibility, emphasising its importance in a post-Covid, highly competitive labour market. This is not a new observation, but rather adds to the findings of previous National Foundation for Educational Research reports on teacher recruitment.

But herein lies the problem: recruitment, recruitment, recruitment.

From Phillipson’s promise to recruit 6,500 new teachers to investment in studies and policy recommendations to get teachers in the door, we are still failing to focus on a far more effective stabilising measure - switching our narrative to sustainable retention rather than short-term churn and burn.

Imagine, if you will, the teacher workforce as a Jenga tower. It’s my favourite metaphor for illustrating the ongoing impact of building up, up, up [recruitment], with little - if any - consideration for the stable base [retention]. In doing so, our tower, however high it goes, teeters on an unstable base.

Protect millennial mothers

And who is most responsible for that stable base? Women aged 30-39 who, as detailed in the Missing Mothers report from The New Britain Project and the Maternity Teacher/Paternity Teacher Project, are the largest cohort of teachers in the sector - and leaving the profession in droves.

For example, women aged 30-39 make up 27 per cent of our profession (127,910 teachers) - more than all male teachers put together (124,891). They are also our largest group of leavers with almost 20,000 leaving across the past two years alone.

All of which paints a conflicting picture of the profession: is teaching incompatible with family life, or the perfect job for working mothers? Are some schools getting it really right, or are female teachers stagnating and putting up with the penalties associated with motherhood rather than taking the risk of changing careers?

When they leave, the Missing Mothers report found most are doing so because of heavy workload, poor mental health and family commitments. The motherhood penalty is clearly one of the biggest drivers of attrition in our profession.

Until we do more to retain these mothers, there is little we can do to promise better conditions for those willing to join us.

The power of experience

Indeed, the Teach First report found that Gen Z do not see teaching as a lifelong career: either they would consider it for a few years before changing jobs, or join the profession later in life having first worked in other industries.

Shifting our investment to our parent-teacher demographic could resolve the resulting recruitment and retention issues created by these two trends.

Firstly, offering competitive parental leave packages could tempt career changers into the profession as they begin to envision the long holidays and fulfilling role that would fit in nicely with family life.

Secondly, improved maternity transition support and a helping hand with the cost and logistics of childcare could retain teachers through their late twenties and early thirties when they might otherwise leave to explore other careers.

The beauty of this total shift to investing in parent-teachers (particularly mothers), is that the positive outcomes will be seen far quicker than flogging the tired horse of recruitment where targets are missed again and again.

Retaining even two-thirds of the 9,147 women aged 30-39 who left in 2023 would more than fill the Department for Education’s 6,500 recruitment quota.

What’s more, this would enable us to build our Jenga tower with far stronger foundations by using their expertise to act as mentors for new recruits to guide them on the job and, in this imagined Utopia, prove teaching is a sustainable, long-term career option.

So, if Labour really wants to solve the recruitment crisis, stop talking about it so much and instead focus on how we can make teaching a family-friendly career choice, and retain more mothers in the profession.

Emma Sheppard is a lead practitioner for English and the founder of the Maternity Teacher/Paternity Teacher Project

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