Conference Agenda

Many Anglosphere nations are in the midst of a teacher shortage crisis. In all of these, the historically hardest-to-staff schools are struggling to find enough teachers to teach their students. While UNESCO has declared teaching shortages as a global crisis (Ovenden-Hope, 2022), and teaching workforce shortages are concerning across Europe as well as throughout the US (Federičová,2021) it is useful to examine this phenomenon of teaching shortages in ‘like’ Anglosphere nations with a shared language, geopolitics and social contexts (Legrand, 2021, p. 12). Fuelled by rising student numbers, difficult workplace demands and conditions, an ageing workforce and declining enrolments in initial teacher education programs, the current shortage is placing schools and teachers at breaking point, severely impacting the commitment to deliver a world class education. While the teacher shortage is a system wide issue, its effects are most strongly felt in geographically or socio-economically marginalised communities, those served by the hardest-to-staff schools, where the difficulty of finding qualified teachers is disproportionately impacting on the educational opportunities and student outcomes. Attracting and retaining quality teachers is therefore an urgent priority for all education systems, and solutions need to be found to address the high rates of attrition, particularly among pre-service and in-service early career teachers who are at the highest risk of leaving the profession. With insufficient numbers of new teachers to replenish the ageing workforce, the capacity of schools to support the educational engagement and attainment of students is, and will continue to be, profoundly impacted.

This symposium brings together four papers from research in England and Australia examining the issue of teacher retention. Each paper addresses the common research question: What are the factors impacting current and extreme teaching workforce issues and how can a better understanding of these issues influence educational policy to attract, prepare and retain teachers in these uncertain times? Two of these papers focus on particular cohorts of teachers who are at risk of leaving the profession, considering how current policy and practices are contributing towards the high rates of attrition among precariously employed early career teachers and career change teachers. The third explores the impact of Ofsted on teacher attrition as one example of the increasingly neoliberal education policy environment in England. The fourth paper in this symposium focuses on teacher retention to examine how teachers remaining in the hardest to staff schools are managing under conditions outside of their control. The symposium will generate insight into why teachers are choosing to leave the profession, how they manage their work when they stay and offer opportunities to identify potential solutions which can address this major educational crisis.

In Australia, teaching shortages post-Covid are a growing concern as is the case to varying degrees in many other Anglosphere nations. For instance, Ireland (Geoghegan, 2022), Scotland (Wang & Houston, 2023) and England (Ovenden-Hope, 2022; Perryman, 2022) are all experiencing teacher recruitment problems, as are schools in the US (Bryner, 2021). While workforce issues are most prevalent in certain subject areas and always impact disadvantaged schools most, in all cases, teacher shortages, including teacher attrition, are seen as related to such things as untenable workloads, loss of professionalism and the overall declining status of the teaching profession. This paper reports on some early findings of an Australian Research Council Discovery project that explores the work lives of teachers remaining in schools with very high teacher turnover. In contrast to previous research that has examined the attrition of teachers from hard-to-staff schools through focusing on those who have left teaching, this study aims to develop a broader understanding of the issues of retention by attending instead on its impact on those teachers who remain. In order to understand teachers’ work lives our research aims to disentangle the interplay of the technical, moral, political, and emotional dimensions connected to these teachers’ lives. Our work-storied approach places a high degree of importance on the ‘day in the life’ of teachers who remain in schools experiencing high teacher turnover (>10% attrition in a 12-month period). This involves sculpting interpretations out of verbal accounts and observations of teachers that elucidate how they are managing their work in circumstance outside of their control. In this paper we explain our ‘work-shadowing’ methodology and reflect on what we have learned about the daily, working lives of teachers in two of our high teacher turnover case study schools. By addressing the problem of retention in this way, we aim to advance a much deeper, nuanced understanding of how educational policies and systems, as well as individual schools, can support those teachers who remain in the profession, and thus facilitate greater teacher retention at a time when maintaining support for a declining teaching workforce is urgent.

Bryner, L. (2021). The Teacher Shortage in the United States. Education and Society 39(1), 69-80. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.7459/es/39.1.05 Geoghegan, A. (2022). Should I Stay or Should I Go? An Exploration of the Experiences of Career Change Teachers in Ireland: Motivations for Changing Career and the Factors that Influence Their Attrition from the Teaching Profession. Ovenden-Hope, T. (2022). A status-based crisis of teacher shortages? Research in Teacher Education. Vol.12. No 1. Nov 2022. Perryman, J., Bradbury, A., Calvert, G., & Kilian, K. (2023). Beyond Ofsted Inquiry: Final Report. Wang, W., & Houston, M. (2023). Teaching as a career choice: the motivations and expectations of students at one Scottish University. Educational Studies, 49(6), 937-954.

Successive Australian policies including the Liberal government’s Next Steps: Report of the Quality Initial Teacher Education Review (2022) and the Labor government’s Teacher Education Expert Panel Discussion Paper (2023) have positioned midcareer Initial Teacher Education (ITE) entrants as ‘game changers’ to address teacher shortages and enhance diversity in the teaching profession. Indeed, research reveals that their status as game changers is often short lived as 25% are more likely to leave the profession within the first five years than those that enter via more traditional pathways. It is therefore timely to examine the retention of this cohort in ITE in more depth. How these so-called ‘career change teachers’ are defined, and how ITE programs cater to the needs of this unique cohort, are not fully understood. This paper brings together Stephen Ball’s policy enactment, and Margaret Archer’s theorisations on emergent properties to ascertain how 40 Australian teacher educators are responding to this policy direction. We describe how interpretive, material, and discursive lenses of policy enactment are infused with either enabling and/or constraining emergences of translation. In doing so, first we outline how teacher educators speak and think about career change teachers. Second, we analyse teacher educators’ deliberations on the personal, structural and/or cultural conditions that they weigh up to accommodate (or not) this specific group. Findings reveal that teacher educators define career change teachers in similar and divergent ways and institutions accommodate this group variously. Recommendations are made for how universities can better prepare and sustain this cohort to stay in the profession.

Australian Government. (2023). Teacher education expert panel discussion paper. Retrieved from https://www.education.gov.au/quality-initial-teacher-education-review/resources/teacher-education-expert-panel-discussion-paper Australian Government. (2022) Next Steps: Report of the Quality Initial Teacher Education review> Retrieved from https://www.education.gov.au/quality-initial-teacher-education-review/resources/next-steps-report-quality-initial-teacher-education-review

Internationally, support provided to teachers during their early career phase has long been referred to as ‘induction’. In Australia, induction is largely provided by schools because ‘school-based induction practices … [are the] … the most useful in enculturating beginning teachers to their school and to their career’ (Kearney, 2021, p.153). However, with 60% of new teachers employed casually or on short-term contracts (Preston, 2019), many work across multiple schools and education sectors. Such teachers might engage in multiple induction events at individual schools; however, it is unlikely they receive an ongoing, systematic induction that meets their individual needs across the first few years of their work. This paper reports a critical policy study that examined the ‘Graduate to Proficient: Australian guidelines for teacher induction into the profession’ (2016). It draws on critical human resources management theory, including concepts such as ‘onboarding’ with the aim of providing alternative insights into the induction process for early career teachers. Our analysis suggests that the guidelines are more concerned with onboarding practices delivered to teachers with job security, rather than an overall system of practices that develop all new teachers regardless of their employment mode. The limitation means that the guidelines are unlikely to support precariously employed early career teachers to maximise their development during the earliest months and years of their career. Finally, we argue that further research on the teaching workforce which draws on the human resource management research is needed to better understand the development of the teaching workforce.

Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. (2016). Graduate to proficient: Australian guidelines for teacher induction into the profession. Canberra, Australia: Education Services Australia. Kearney, S. (2021). The challenges of beginning teacher induction: a collective case study. Teaching Education, 32(2), 142-158. Preston, B. (2019). Reforming replacement teaching: A game changer for the development of early career teaching? In A. Sullivan, B. Johnson, & M. Simons (Eds.), Attracting and keeping the best teachers: Issues and opportunities (pp. 161-191). Springer Nature.

Whilst hotly contested from within the organisation, Ofsted, the English school inspectorate, are often blamed for creating a toxic work-culture in English schools. But to what extent does Ofsted contribute to England’s worsening teacher retention crisis? This paper draws upon data from the ‘Beyond Ofsted’ research project, where a survey, focus groups and stakeholder consultations aimed to find out teachers’ opinions of Ofsted and what alternatives could be suggested. The finding of this report (Perryman et al 2023) suggested that many teachers thought of Ofsted as ‘toxic’ and ‘not fit for purpose’. In addition, survey results show how impactful inspection can be for teachers’ health, wellbeing and career plans. For example, 30% of the sample said that inspection made them want to leave teaching, and 76% thought that Ofsted had a negative effect on retention. But are Ofsted to blame? Teachers’ working lives increasingly affected by the rise in the neo-liberal performativity /accountability culture in schools as, internationally, schools are preoccupied with policies of achievement, particularly test results. The global rise in accountability mechanisms is increasingly accepted as a natural part of the neo-liberal education system, with any critics of the regime seen as being against progress. This has led many schools to adopt a plethora of strategies aimed at improving results, often referred to as ‘box-ticking’. Teachers’ work is directed towards assessment, exams, progress measures and preparation for review and inspection, and away from the more individualistic and creative aspects of the job. These strategies, and their constancy, impact negatively on teachers’ lives, and thus on retention. But such trends are found in many countries adopting a neoliberal education policy environment. The Beyond Ofsted data shows that, in England, the problem is exacerbated by the surveillance of these performative-accountability regimes. Previous research suggests that Ofsted impacts negatively on the health and well-being of staff and thus impacts teacher retention (Bousted, 2022; Perryman, 2022) and Ofsted’s own survey on the wellbeing of teachers (Ofsted, 2019), reported that the demands of inspection heavily influenced teachers’ working practices. Teachers worked a 50–57-hour week, over half of which was spent outside the classroom, on Ofsted preparation meetings, and data-focused tasks. Our paper poses the question as to whether Ofsted is to blame for these trends and increasing teacher attrition, or whether the blame lies in policy or school cultures that place value on judgement and competitive engagement over education and well-being.

Bousted, M. (2022). Support Not Surveillance: How to solve the teacher retention crisis. Melton: John Catt. Ofsted. (2019). Teacher well-being at work in schools and further education providers. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/teacher-well-being-at-work-in-schools- and-further-education-providers Perryman, J. (2022). Teacher retention in an age of Performative Accountability: Target Culture and the Discourse of Disappointment. London: Routledge. Perryman, J., Bradbury, A., Calvert, G., & Kilian, K. (2023). Beyond Ofsted Inquiry: Final Report.