There is just so much overstretching of teachers. There is too much pressure and expectation - it feels relentless.”

After just three years in the job, Sarah* decided she could no longer continue teaching. A talented and committed individual, she had begun her career with “idealistic energy”, and had thrown herself into the challenge of “making a positive difference to young people”.

However, like for so many others, her hopes and dreams were crushed by the reality that she encountered once qualified. She could not go on. And as of this month, she is an ex-teacher.

Why do teachers like Sarah leave within the first five years of being qualified? It’s not a single-system or single-country issue: across the world, nations are haemorrhaging early career teachers at an alarming rate.

In England, Department for Education data from June shows that 15.3 per cent of teachers who qualified in 2017 left the profession after their first year of teaching. Even more concerning is the fact that just 67.7 per cent of teachers who qualified in 2013 were still in the profession in 2018, and the retention rate is declining each year.

The data is slightly more positive in Wales and Scotland. Yet, it is still enough of an issue for both devolved administrations to be making systematic changes to teacher recruitment and retention. In Wales, the number of teachers leaving the profession has fallen overall since 2007 but there has been an increase since 2012. In Scotland, figures from the General Teaching Council for Scotland show that since 2012, 18 per cent of teachers have left teaching within six years of training.

Meanwhile, various studies from Australia, The Netherlands and the US suggest that up to half of all entrants to teaching choose to leave in the first five years (Dias-Lacy and Guirguis, 2017; Krasnoff, 2014).

It’s a crisis, let’s not pretend otherwise. And the solutions that have been attempted are simply not working.

So, I decided to look into it further. I started a master’s. And its focus was simple: how do you save a teacher?

I was one of those burned-out teachers. I managed four years before I had to admit that I was physically and emotionally exhausted. I contemplated leaving. I questioned whether I was really robust enough to withstand the demands of the job. I ended up being one of the lucky ones. A change in school and an overwhelming passion for education meant I crawled through to the other side. But I was left with the scars and I wanted to understand them. I wanted to try and help others avoid them. So I started my master’s in practitioner enquiry to explore what might help to retain and motivate teachers in their first five years. After carrying out more than 150 interviews and reading countless pieces of research, I found some answers.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of research has been conducted into teacher retention already. For example, an EU Commission study in 2013 warned that many EU countries already had teacher shortages and many more soon would have them, adding that “in most European countries, the teaching profession has lost much of its capacity to attract the best candidates” (bit.ly/TeachReten).

In the US, meanwhile, a recent research paper from the Economic Policy Institute warns that “the teacher shortage problem is much more severe than previously recognised” (bit.ly/USteach), and several studies have also highlighted issues in countries as diverse as Nigeria, Japan and New Zealand.

In short, there is a global problem in terms of keeping new teachers in the job.

Working too hard for too little

Efforts to arrest the decline have centred on trying to find out the reasons why teachers are leaving. This is difficult because, as the US study cited above states, “it is important to acknowledge that the teacher shortage is the result of multiple and interdependent drivers, all working simultaneously to cause the imbalance between the number of new teachers needed (demand) and the number of individuals available to be hired (supply)”.

You can, however, see similarities across the research. In every country, a disparity between pay and working conditions is cited - teachers are working too hard for too little.

In England, the extensive Teacher Workload Survey in 2016 highlighted that teachers in their first five years faced much longer hours than their more experienced colleagues. A DfE research report on this identified a wide range of reasons for the pressure: “Respondents most commonly said that the burden of their workload was created by: accountability/perceived pressures of Ofsted [cited by 53 per cent of respondents] [and] tasks set by senior/middle leaders [51 per cent]. Working to policies set at local/school level [35 per cent] and policy change at national level [34 per cent] were also significant drivers for teacher workload.”

Meanwhile, the EU Commission study added that another factor was “the growing [teacher] shortage is addressed by means of longer working hours for teachers, higher pupil-teacher ratios and an increase in the retirement age”.

But it is not just the level of work and a lack of remuneration that is at play. The US study cites fears over safety and pupil behaviour: “Teachers report that student absenteeism, class-cutting, student apathy, lack of parental involvement, poor student health, poverty and other factors are a problem. Larger shares of teachers also report high levels of stress and fears for their safety.”

This is echoed in the UK: for example, in a NASUWT teaching union survey, 82 per cent of teachers said pupil behaviour was a problem in their school - with more than half (57 per cent) saying they had been verbally abused by a pupil in the past year, 18 per cent saying they had been threatened with violence and 14 per cent saying they had been physically attacked.

And across the studies, a lack of training comes up again and again. The EU study explained that “CPD is indispensable to ensure that teachers adapt to new developments. Currently, only a minority of teachers actually receive genuine CPD”. The US study reports that “the lack of supports that are critical to succeeding in the classroom and the unsatisfactory continued training make teaching less attractive and impede its professionalisation”.

In England, the Institute for Public Policy Research suggests that there is a shortage of expert teachers who stay in the profession for a longer period of time, in part due to a lack of incentives to participate in training and development. This is supported by a DfE report into early career CPD, which states: “Our hypothesis was that the provision of high-quality training and support for teachers in their first three years may have contributed to case-study schools’ high levels of retention.” The report also says “not enough early career teachers receive the support they need to build a successful career”.

And finally, leadership has been shown to be key. Richard Ball’s research shows that widespread observation, monitoring, appraisal, target-setting and league tables lead to a culture of “low trust”. This cultural influence has a significant impact in terms of how comfortable and motivated new teachers feel, as they are likely to feel this pressure more keenly than experienced colleagues. Research from Day and Gu (2007) found that, at the start of their career, teachers’ confidence and sense of efficacy is strongly linked to the support on offer from colleagues and leadership.

You may think that all this gave me, in my own research, nowhere to go: what could I bring to the table? But I was interested in not just the literature and data, but in capturing the experience of real teachers in their first five years. After all, how often do we take the time to look beyond the statistics, to genuinely listen and seek to learn from those who are at the heart of the issue? So I interviewed more than 150 teachers who were in their first five years of teaching or who had left during those first five years.

Cost and time meant my work was constrained to the UK, but I believe the themes that emerged and the potential fixes are applicable to other countries, too.

What my research does not support is the idea that what we are experiencing is “natural wastage” - that those leaving just aren’t that into teaching and have made the wrong career decision. Across those struggling and those who had already left, every individual demonstrated a passion for learning and developing as a practitioner. They had left despite their feelings about education and the basic job of a teacher, not because of them.

My research clearly showed that teachers in the first five years feel they have a real lack of time to manage the expectations that are placed on them. The various pressures they face all contribute to feelings of being overwhelmed, and being unable to find the time to be strategic and organised. This has a knock-on effect of reducing time even more. There is a vicious cycle at play that seems to have permeated the vast majority of schools.

Digging deeper, it quickly became clear that the theme of training underpinned so many of the issues these teachers faced:

• A lack of provision of effective CPD, or the lack of differentiated training for teachers, resulted in loss of motivation and increased stress.
• Teachers recognised that they should be learning and making improvements in their practice, but felt they hadn’t yet the skills to understand how to do it effectively.
• There was a lack of time for meaningful collaboration to learn from others around them. The dominant experience for some of these teachers was one of isolation and high stress levels.

What the teachers interviewed found particularly challenging was balancing the contrast between receiving extensive support in their training and NQT years and what some described as a “void” of guidance and mentoring in the years following. A number spoke of the need for a structured coaching or mentoring programme.

Leadership ethos was also one of the significant factors influencing motivation and retention. Teachers struggled to understand why so much of their energy and focus was taken up with inputting data, in the most extreme cases involving half-termly data collection points. There appears to be a lack of recognition by management of the time this requires and the additional pressure it generates. Regimented marking policies, a lack of support with behaviour, the continuation of graded lesson observations and regular learning walk observations also contribute to dissatisfaction and high stress.

So, how do you save a teacher?

Putting my own research and that of others together, you can begin to unpick three key areas that would transform the experience of teachers new to the profession. It’s my belief that addressing these would have a significant impact on teacher retention.

1. A five-year support plan

Clearly, to help retain teachers in the first five years, schools need to prioritise developing a strategic support plan. In England, there are moves towards establishing this, with plans to introduce an Early Career Framework, involving a two-year package of structured training and support for teachers in their early career.

Yet while the principles behind the Early Career Framework show positive steps in the right direction, my research suggests we need to look at how this can be developed to encompass the full first five years of a teacher’s career. And we need to make sure the support on offer is not only effective and consistent, but also what individual teachers actually need, not what those in leadership or policy positions think all teachers will need.

The EU Commission study also said that training should be properly recognised: “Teachers who attend CPD programmes should receive recognition through career advancement or others means.”

How could a support plan over five years be run sustainably? Embedding coaching and mentoring in a school professional development culture, and giving teachers the time to prioritise these vital conversations, could be one way. Teachers in their first five years feel the void of feedback after their NQT year keenly, and more regular feedback and dialogue about their teaching will help to sustain both motivation and self-efficacy.

While it may sound utopian, the teachers who were thriving in their first five years spoke of being part of learning communities, in which everyone was committed to developing and prioritising what happens in the classroom. It is clear that staff in their initial years of teaching also value expertise and modelling from more experienced staff.

Building in more timetabled opportunities to allow meaningful collaboration between teachers of different expertise could make a real difference.

Of course, raising pay, too, would encourage some newly qualified teachers to remain - but not all. As the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development report entitled “Building a High-Quality Teaching Profession: Lessons from around the world” states: “Countries that have succeeded in making teaching an attractive profession have often done so not just through pay but by raising the status of teaching, offering real career prospects and giving teachers responsibility as professionals and leaders of reform.”

2. Supporting leadership

Another key focus if we are to save new teachers must be accountability and leadership: the teachers I spoke to had an overwhelming desire to focus on teaching and learning in their classrooms. Too often, however, the quality of their lessons was sacrificed for tasks that were dictated by management. One teacher spoke of how endless marking and book reviews by senior management meant that he barely planned his lessons any more.

Accountability pressure appears to be most acute in England, and is certainly more cited in the literature here than in other countries. English inspectorate Ofsted has made a series of recommendations to reduce this pressure, but are schools really being brave enough to implement them yet? Are teachers still spending hours on spread-sheets and data? Are prescriptive marking policies still stealing hours of weekends and evenings?

Most importantly, are we supporting leadership training and on-the-job leadership CPD so that leaders are able to provide the culture that new teachers need?

Teachers in their first five years need to be given time to grow and learn, in an environment that trusts them to do this. We encourage our students to make mistakes and to learn from them; yet we too often present a visage of perfection around what happens in classrooms. It is perhaps time we developed a more empathetic and humane approach. These teachers need our time, energy and positivity. They need pearls of experience, reassurance and the support to find both perspective and positivity.

3. Pooling resources

Lastly, we need to move away from seeing the problems of teacher retention in a silo of policy. The loss of new teachers within the first five years is an issue affecting systems of all shapes and sizes. Yes, there are some country/system-specific causes but there is also much we can learn from each other by being outward-looking, moving beyond politics and pooling resources to find what might work. Blaming one government policy for the issue is a waste of time and resources.

What next?

Teachers in their first five years should be holding on to their “idealistic energy”; they should be the cheerleaders for our profession. Their students should be the beneficiaries of innovation, passion and belief in improvement. We need NQTs to see teaching for what it should be: the most noble and rewarding of professions - one to devote a career to honing and developing in.

The fact that many do not, at this stage, highlights that we are failing to nurture and motivate them well enough. Some may argue that the proposals here are unrealistic, and that teachers should “sink or swim” in the modern education arena. If they are not robust enough to last the first five years, how will they cope with a long career in teaching?

My conversations, however, have illuminated just how challenging these first five years are, and the statistics speak for themselves. Teaching is, without doubt, a profession that the passage of time makes easier and more manageable. We need to move quickly to sustain our profession. Cynicism will only lead to more teachers becoming disillusioned with the demands of the role.

Schools may need to make brave decisions to justify a significant focus on teachers in their first five years, particularly in the face of financial constraints and examination pressures. It is an investment, however, that will reward itself over time. These teachers are arguably the most willing to hone their skills and learn quickly.

This dialogue is one that I hope to see continuing with urgency: what can we implement practically in our own school contexts to save these new teachers from leaving the profession? Offering them differentiated support and time, rather than burning them out with unrealistic expectations, will be a hugely positive start for the future of the teaching profession.

Jamie Thom is a teacher of English. His book, A Quiet Education, will be published later this year. He runs the Tes English podcast and writes regularly for Tes online. He tweets @teachgratitude1

This article originally appeared in the 20 September 2019 issue under the headline “Stopping the collapse”