How to keep teachers teaching: 5 ways to solve the retention crisis in UK schools

Teachers in the United Kingdom are leaving the profession in droves.

After several years of worrying rises, the departure rate peaked at 10% of school staff quitting in 2022^[ii]. The figures are even higher for newly qualified teachers: their initial experiences are so negative that 20% have left within just two years of qualifying. Exacerbating this exodus is the fact that for years the Government has failed to meet its own recruitment targets for new teachers. In 2020, 9,500 more teachers left the profession than joined it, which was the highest disparity since 2010.

These trends amount to a reality where 54% of UK students are in schools where the provision of education is being hindered by a lack of teaching staff^[iii]. The teachers who have decided to stay are being left to pick up the pieces of an increasingly desperate jigsaw puzzle of problems across the sector. Naturally, this situation lends itself to widespread dissatisfaction within the profession and a growing desire to leave. Of those teachers who haven’t bitten the bullet already, a fifth said they were likely to leave within 5 years^[iv].

This blog post seeks to offer solutions that policymakers and school leaders could investigate to reverse the tide of teacher departures from UK schools. It will consider strategies targeted at some of the central reasons given for leaving, which range from unmanageably high workloads to rises in poor student behaviour.

Keeping teachers teaching should be a priority for all decision-makers in education right now. A revolving door of teachers leaving and joining disrupts a school’s community, and in turn the learning of their students, who need consistency and continuity from those responsible for their education. There is strong evidence that improving retention is the single most powerful tool available for improving outcomes for the most disadvantaged students in our society.^[i] If we fail to tackle this problem, we fail to help the very students who need our help the most.

So, what can be done?

Table Of Contents

Giving back teachers their time
Paying teachers adequately
Supporting students, supporting teachers
A national crackdown on student behaviour, an easier life for teachers
Reviewing professional development for staff
Final Thoughts

Giving back teachers their time

With workload stresses being deemed the most common reason for leaving^[i], it makes sense to confront this problem first.

Government figures indicate that UK teachers work on average 49.3 hours per week, well above the 41-hour average reported across all OECD nations^[ii]. Unsurprisingly, a majority of staff consider this workload as being unmanageable. If staff are overworked, they are unlikely to be able to do their job to a personally satisfactory standard. Subsequently, they are unlikely to be satisfied with their jobs.

The Government is well aware of this problem and has touted its ambition to reduce the weekly figures by 5 hours before 2026^[iii]. It has published a workload reduction toolkit for school leaders, containing strategies which include reducing the emphasis on administrative tasks like marking. This has yielded some positive results already, with a reduction of 1.68 hours per week from 2018 to 2022. But if they are to meet their own ambitious targets, more ambitious action is required.

One of the most obvious solutions to this problem is to increase PPA. PPA refers to the hours protected each week for teachers to be free to complete tasks like marking and planning. Allowing for more free periods would see teachers being able to undertake their roles more effectively, and for a greater focus to be placed on supporting each child’s performance. Moreover, many teachers see their PPA hours clustered around a few days. Instead, these hours should be spread evenly throughout the week to ensure daily workloads are not regularly high.

To allow for more PPA, there needs to be more staff available to cover those extra hours. It is therefore vital that the Government gets a handle on the concurrent teacher recruitment crisis. Without diving into this specific issue, the correct responses are to drastically increase funding to hire new teachers and to make real efforts to improve working conditions so that a career in teaching becomes a more attractive prospect.

A four-day week in teaching should seriously be considered. This is perhaps a more radical solution, but suitably so for the size of the retention crisis. Arranging school timetables in a way that could allow for a four-day workweek is entirely feasible. But this requires more staff to be recruited, and for each staff member’s teaching hours to be reduced accordingly. Whilst still keeping students in school for the five days, staff could be grouped by subjects into a rota which ensures that for one day per week, their subject is not being taught. They would be able to have that day off to switch off from teaching and improve their work-life balance. It then follows that on the four days they are in school, staff would be more energised and ready to teach to the best of their abilities.

If that proposal seems too pie in the sky, there at least needs to be some thinking about how to make teaching hours more flexible. Many comparable professions are actively thinking about how to make roles more flexible. Flexible working practices available in other sectors were found to make teachers 64% more likely to leave education^[iv]. Flexibility in teaching could be achieved by allowing staff to come into school late if their free periods are at the start of the school day and leave school early if their free period is at the end of the day. This greater flexibility would surely help to return a degree of work-life balance to all teaching staff.

Paying teachers adequately

Pay is another frequently cited reason for staff wanting to leave the profession. In real terms, teacher pay has fallen by about a fifth since 2010 against inflation. As such teacher pay has grown far slower than comparable roles in the private sector^[i]. Given that teachers are often highly qualified professionals, it is then no surprise that so many are considering leaving for better remuneration.

Accordingly, this is a central focus for the Department for Education. Following the 2023 strikes, a 6.5% increase in pay was agreed for teachers^[ii]. But after years of the Government consciously deciding to freeze teacher pay to manage difficult public finances, more still needs to be done and pay should be tied to inflation.

Currently, Government efforts in this area are largely focussed on encouraging recruitment, with early career payments for certain shortage subjects and tweaks to trainee bursaries^[iii]. Evidence suggests that these short-term pay increases are usually only effective for as long as they are available, and in turn, they are likely only a temporary fix^[iv].

Pay needs to reflect the difficulty of teaching within certain schools. It is no coincidence that the most challenging schools are those that also see some of the lowest teacher retention rates. These schools have the highest levels of turnover, more unfilled vacancies and fewer subject specialist teachers^[v]. It is therefore necessary to investigate how pay could be utilised to encourage teachers to join and stay on in these schools. In return for the unique complexities of teaching in these environments, teachers should be paid more than in schools where their life might be comparably easier.

Teachers widely work considerable amounts of overtime, and this is not reflected in pay. The Government should look at contracted hours and review what teachers are working beyond timetabled hours^[vi], and pay should be aligned with this overtime.

Financial incentives, however, are unlikely to be the sole remedy, and generally, they are usually more effective for initial recruitment than retention down the line. As such, where the Government is focussed quite intensely on this issue, they need to see this as merely part of the solution and investigate wider structural solutions too.

Supporting students, supporting teachers

At current, a great deal of teachers’ time is spent on matters beyond directly teaching. Schools are increasingly seen as a one-stop shop for supporting students and their families, with schools fulfilling roles that range from acting as food banks to mental health services. Depending on the goodwill of educators to fill the gaping hole in social services after years of Government cuts in these areas is simply unacceptable.

At the same time as the prevalence of SEN, mental health issues and ESL skyrockets in schools, teachers are being stretched in their ability to adequately support all of their students.

Simply put teachers need more support if they are to continue supporting their students, and not feel overwhelmed to the point of leaving.

There needs to be greater access to trained professionals on-site. Councillors, mental health workers and social workers should be commonplace in every school across the country. This takes some responsibility out of the hands of teachers and ensures that all students have the support they need to be ready to learn.

Teaching assistants need to be given more training and offered professional qualifications that equip them to handle their pivotal role within education. Despite admirable efforts, staff in these roles are often underqualified to provide the highest possible levels of support that match the high needs of the students they work with. Pay for TAs should also be increased to a level that reflects the critical nature of their work supporting teachers. Funding should be allocated to increase the numbers of teaching assistants availablein each school such that they are present in every class where their support is necessary.

1 in 5 children in England have a probable mental health disorder^[i]. Teachers are often the first line of interaction towards identifying these additional needs and are woefully underequipped to handle these issues in a class of often more than 30 students. Every teacher should be trained in the best ways to support students with additional needs. Staff could also be mental health first aid trained and ready to identify those students who need more support. At current this is often left to guesswork and these students end up without any support or worse punished for behaviour which is simply unmanageable. Mental health and SEN diagnoses need to be accelerated so that students can more quickly access the help necessary to thrive in education.

A national crackdown on student behaviour, an easier life for teachers

For many teachers, the widely reported rises in poor student behaviour, especially since the pandemic, can be an ongoing bane in their day-to-day lives. Conversations comparing work with non-teacher friends can leave staff wondering why they must put up with such poor behaviour and at times abuse from students. Naturally, this can contribute to job dissatisfaction and a desire to quit^[i].

Whilst some schools pride themselves on their management of behaviour, there are far too many schools where behaviour is simply out of control. 2/3 of all teachers report that poor behaviour is the single biggest issue in their school^[ii].

Subsequently, there needs to be a national drive on improving student behaviour and at the heart of this needs to be a plan to build discipline and a culture of respect for teachers. Such a culture is commonplace in other nations, namely high-flying Asian systems like Taiwan^[iii]. There is no reason the same cannot be achieved in the UK with a concerted effort on the part of all. This could start with each school ensuring greater levels of parental buy-in through a more concerted effort towards communication with families. Student respect for teachers is impossible without having their families on their side too.

It is no secret that poor behaviour often emerges from various complex issues that are not being addressed. This links closely with my previous point on getting students the support they need from professionals,and training teachers appropriately to deal with a vast array of issues that can underly poor behaviour. Offering students who present problematic behaviour the appropriate support should be paramount in this strategy.

School leaders also need appropriate training on evidence-based strategies for improving behaviour across their schools. This should be linked with greater collaboration between schools to improve understanding of best practices and implementation. At present, poor behaviour can be reported by teachers to school leaders, and the support structures are just not there in response. What results is teachers having to manage unacceptable behaviour in isolation. This task is often near impossible to achieve at the same time as ensuring the highest quality delivery of lessons.

All of this plays into the need for there to be a concerted effort to handle poor behaviour within the school earlier through effective preventative measures. The worrying levels of school exclusion rates must be reduced. As tempting as school exclusions can be to quickly relieve the problem, far more needs to be done to ensure that the crisis point which results in a school exclusion is not being reached. Avoiding these crisis points is vital in removing the stress which these incidents can place on the teachers that are involved too.

Therefore, behaviour management should form the bedrock of all teacher training schemes. Focussing on pedagogy is almost redundant unless every teacher can manage their classroom effectively from the very start of their careers.

Every school should be readily equipped to handle poor behaviour and ensure it does not get out of control. From here all teachers can live with the comfort of knowing that regardless of which school they are teaching in, they can be free to do so in a safe and calm environment.

Reviewing professional development for staff

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Amidst their high workload it can often be difficult for teachers to progress in their roles, and this stagnation can lead to feelings of job dissatisfaction. A greater focus needs to be given to the professional development of staff, not only to improve the quality of education, but as this has been shown to motivate staff to stay^[i].

Again, there has been some movement in this area by the Government. One example has been the recently introduced Early Career Framework (ECF) for new teachers, designed to spur progress and increase the support that is available for them. This forms part of a strategy to encourage these newer teachers to stay in the profession.

The ECF ought to be reviewed to ensure that it isn’t deterring early career teachers. There is evidence to suggest that rather than supporting development, it is simply adding to an already high workload^[ii]. 78% of ECF mentors believe that the framework is having no impact on the retention of ECTs^[iii]. Moreover, much of the content is not subject specific enough to provide the depth of utility that is possible. As a result, newer staff can end up feeling overwhelmed and questioning the merits of yet another burden on their time. ECTs should be given more flexibility to select courses that are best suited to their own experiences and school contexts, where there are elements that are far too generalised at current.

For staff in general there is not enough space provided for them to access the abundance of education research available and implement this into their practice. Time should be permitted for all teachers to conduct their own research projects. They should also be given more autonomy over their own development as this has been shown to improve levels of desire to stay in teaching^[iv]. Staff could also regularly be given time for collaborative visits to other schools to take learnings back to their own schools. Seeing what does and doesn’t work at other schools is considered vital for trainees. So why is this not the case later down the line? This professional development could be incentivised through tying progression with pay rises.

Final Thoughts

Improving staff retention should be at the heart of education policy in the UK going forward. Pursuing policies towards this aim will undoubtedly ensure that teaching becomes a desirable and viable career. Solving this issue will likely improve recruitment rates too.

This blog post has focussed on solutions around reducing workloads, reforming pay, providing more comprehensive support for students, developing a national strategy for behaviour improvement and reviewing professional development. But this list is not exhaustive. Other areas that may be worth considering include a national strategy on the incorporation of AI, improving staff wellbeing, reforming OFSTED, overhauling the curriculum and engaging parents to a greater degree.

Many will rightly remark that the majority of these proposals rest on funding increases that simply are not viable in the current economic climate^[i]. But I would argue that no expense can be spared when it comes to this issue. Any financial savings made by not tackling this issue now will surely amount to ballooning costs in the future as we confront the manifold consequences of inaction.

Teachers, school leaders and the Government need to work together to consider means by which the above strategies can be implemented. Time is of the essence here. The sooner we can get a handle on the teacher retention crisis, the sooner we can actively look towards ensuring that every UK school can provide the highest quality education. This is only possible if we can keep our teachers teaching.

^[i] https://www.tes.com/magazine/analysis/general/teacher-recruitment-retention-crisis-solution

^[i] https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/news/eef-blog-three-takeaways-from-the-evidence-on-improving-teacher-recruitment-and-retention

^[ii] https://schoolsweek.co.uk/teacher-retention-commission-8-proposals-to-stem-exodus/

^[iii] https://www.tes.com/magazine/analysis/general/teacher-recruitment-retention-crisis-solution

^[iv] https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/news/eef-blog-three-takeaways-from-the-evidence-on-improving-teacher-recruitment-and-retention

^[i] https://schoolsweek.co.uk/teacher-retention-commission-8-proposals-to-stem-exodus/

^[ii] https://schoolsweek.co.uk/teacher-retention-commission-8-proposals-to-stem-exodus/

^[iii] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46063947

^[i] https://www.tes.com/magazine/analysis/general/teacher-recruitment-retention-crisis-solution

^[ii] https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7222/CBP-7222.pdf

^[iii] https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7222/CBP-7222.pdf

^[iv] https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/news/eef-blog-three-takeaways-from-the-evidence-on-improving-teacher-recruitment-and-retention