Conference Agenda

Teacher shortages are no longer isolated challenges but constitute a global crisis affecting the stability and quality of education systems worldwide. They are driven by demographic change, recruitment difficulties, increasing attrition and ageing teacher populations alongside structural changes such as insufficiently planned policy reforms (Boström & Bostedt 2026). While the challenge is shared internationally, it manifests differently, affecting rural and urban areas as well as schools serving socio-economically diverse communities in distinct ways (McHenry-Sorber & Campbell, 2019).

Policy responses often draw on similar repertoires, such as expanding recruitment pathways, accelerating certification routes, or strengthening data-driven workforce planning. When enacted locally, however, these measures interact with specific labor markets, governance arrangements, and professional conditions, sometimes generating new tensions such as the emergence of qualitative teacher shortages (where unqualified or insufficiently qualified teachers fill vacant positions, see Boström & Bostedt, 2025). This illustrates how globally circulating policy ideas are selectively translated and recontextualized within national and local settings, rather than implemented uniformly (Steiner-Khamsi, 2016). Accordingly, the drivers of shortages vary across systems: while high attrition and challenging working conditions shape shortages in some, demographic growth, policy histories, and structural constraints are more central for others. Reflecting differences in educational governance (Maag Merki & Altrichter, 2015), teacher labor market regulation can thus be understood as a multi-level system in which macro-level institutional structures, meso-level actors, and micro-level practices jointly shape shortages and policy responses.

At the school level, teacher shortages affect instructional capacity and working conditions. TALIS 2024 shows that nearly one quarter of teachers work in schools where shortages of qualified teachers limit the school’s capacity to provide quality instruction. Maintaining instructional quality under these conditions requires substantial coordination and sensemaking to sustain organizational coherence and internal relationships (Castro, 2023). Leadership practices are closely linked to teacher retention, professional commitment, and school culture (Liebowitz & Porter, 2019). Principals, district leaders, and other intermediary-level actors operate at the intersection of policy and local organizational realities within the single school, where teacher supply, leadership practices, and school functioning are closely interconnected. How leaders make sense of shortages, even concerning constraints beyond their direct control, shapes how they approach recruitment, retention, and school culture. These efforts frequently involve balancing tensions between supporting teacher well-being and meeting accountability expectations for student outcomes (Blaushild & Seelig, 2024).

This symposium brings together research from diverse national contexts to examine how leaders make sense of teacher shortages, manage tensions between global or national expectations and local demands, and shape school development and professional conditions. The contributions adopt multiple perspectives, including those of school leaders, teachers with diverse qualification backgrounds, and other actors affected by shortages. Collectively, the contributions address the question: How do leaders at different system levels make sense of and respond to teacher shortages across diverse contexts?

Paper 1 uses interview data to examine how Swedish principals, regional school authorities, and national school authorities make sense of and respond to teacher shortages. Paper 2 uses interview data from Austrian school leaders to discuss the impact of the employment of non-traditionally qualified teachers on the work of schools, the teacher education system, and concepts of professionalism. Paper 3 uses survey data to investigate how municipal context in Switzerland shapes teacher shortage by examining variance between and within municipalities.

Taken together, the contributions highlight that although teacher shortage is a shared crisis with cross-national similarities, the paths through which systems respond, and the effectiveness of those responses, depend fundamentally on context-sensitive leadership and locally grounded knowledge. This underscores the need for school development that takes into account local conditions, dependencies, and professional realities.

Teacher shortages are a persistent and intensifying challenge with consequences for quality, equity, and system sustainability (OECD, 2024). Yet we know less about how actors at different governance levels interpret and respond to shortages given their institutional roles and capacities. This paper examines how principals, regional school authorities, and national school authorities in Sweden make sense of and respond to teacher shortages, identifying convergences, divergences, and cross level tensions in problem framing and action logics The study draws on empirical data from interviews and structured dialogues with principals (n=75), regional school authorities (n=20), and national school authorities (n=51). We conducted a comparative thematic analysis, combining inductive coding with theoretically informed analysis across levels. The approach is anchored in sensemaking (Weick, 1995) and multi level educational governance (Ozga, 2010). Themes were developed within each governance level and subsequently compared across levels to identify convergences, divergences, and cross-level tensions. Across levels, shortages are framed as a systemic, structural problem rather than a temporary labour market imbalance, with pronounced risks to instructional quality and equity, especially in rural and socioeconomically disadvantaged contexts and in shortage subjects. Principals emphasise immediate impacts on everyday practice: administrative overload, role expansion, safety concerns, and constrained professional voice—factors linked to attrition (Boström & Bostedt, 2026). Regional authorities frame shortages as a coordination and capacity challenge, shaped by geography, fragmented policy instruments, and uneven access to teacher education; they prioritise regional partnerships, hybrid pathways, and retention via workload relief and competence development. National school authorities advance a macro-structural interpretation, linking shortages to demographic change, certification regimes, reform density, and the erosion of professional status, resulting in a redistribution of responsibility onto a shrinking core of certified teachers (Boström, 2023). Despite these differences, actors across levels converge on similar responses: protecting instructional quality, redesigning teachers’ work, expanding flexible and work-integrated pathways into teaching, and calling for greater long-term policy coherence. The study contributes to research on educational governance by showing how shared diagnoses of teacher shortages coexist with level-specific sensemaking shaped by institutional position and proximity to practice. The findings highlight a central governance dilemma: while solutions are broadly aligned, authority, resources, and time horizons remain weakly connected across levels, constraining sustainable responses to teacher shortages.

Boström, L. & Bostedt, G. (2025). The teacher shortage in Sweden: an unexplored area with variousviews on causes and solutions. Frontiers in Education, 10, 1-11.https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2025.1633409 Boström, L. (2023). What is the problem and how can we solve it? School authorities’ perceptions of the teacher shortage in Sweden. Educational Research for Policy and Practice. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10671-023-09350-7 OECD. (2024). Education at a Glance 2024: OECD Indicators. https://doi.org/10.1787/c00cad36-en Ozga, J. (2010). Governing education through data in England. Journal of Education Policy, 25(6), 703–722. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930902733121 Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Sage.

As in other European countries (EC 2023; Porsch et al., 2025; UNESCO, 2024), there is currently a shortage of teachers in Austria, to which the government has responded with a ‘package of measures’ (BMBWF, n.d.) that includes advertising and image-building measures, changes to teacher training, and the hiring of ‘non-traditionally’ qualified teachers. As a result, in the 2024/25 school year almost 50% (49.1%; BMBWF, 2025) of newly recruited teachers belonged to one of three groups of “non-traditionally” qualified teachers (teacher training students without a degree, career changers, special contract teachers). Both shortages and counter measures may have an impact on the work and functioning of the education system: Staff recruitment, qualification and deployment are essential elements of the governance of the education system (Altrichter, 2010), which is put under pressure by emergency measures. The diversification of staff can have an impact on the organisation of school work (Pauling, 2023). The recruitment and work of non-traditionally qualified staff may change concepts of professionalism in the teaching profession (Cramer et al., 2023). As research so far has often focused on qualification programmes (Flick-Holtsch et al., 2024) and on the characteristics and experiences of newly recruited alternatively qualified teachers (Helm et al., 2025), the present study focuses on the perspective of school leaders and their efforts to integrate non-traditionally qualified staff into the school’s work. Based on qualitative, guided interviews with Austrian primary and secondary school leaders we want to discuss the following questions: What expectations and experiences do school leaders in Austrian schools have with regard to non-traditionally qualified teachers? How important are subject-specific and/or pedagogical qualifications in this context? What impact do teacher shortages and the employment of non-traditionally qualified teachers have on the work and further development of the respective school? What specific forms of deployment and measures for accompanying, supporting and qualifying non-traditionally qualified teachers can be observed in schools? How are the roles of actors and coordination mechanisms in the education system changing as a result of the recruitment and employment of non-traditionally qualified teaching staff? The presentation and discussion of the results will focus among others on the following topics: coordination and re-balancing of the various tasks to be performed on individual school level (e.g. school development/maintaining school quality, individual support, school management, external image, etc.), coordination relationships on system level between teacher training, individual schools and education administration, and implications for changing concepts of teacher professionalism.

Altrichter, H. (2010). Theory and Evidence on Governance: conceptual and empirical strategies of research on governance in education. European Educational Research Journal, 9(2), 147-158. BMBWF (2025). Umsetzung der Pädagog/innenbildungNeu - 16. Austauschplattform. Handout. BMBWF: Wien. BMBWF (n.d.). Ressortstrategie „Klasse Job“. https://www.bmbwf.gv.at/Themen/schule/zrp/klassejob.html; 28.12.2023 Cramer, C., Groß Ophoff, J. & Schreiber, F. (2023). Professionalität im Lehrerinnen- und Lehrerberuf. Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, 69(1), 67-87. EC [European Commission] (2023). Education and Training Monitor 2023. Publications Office, European Union. Flick-Holtsch, D., Forster-Heinzer, S., & Frey, A. (2024). Quereinstiegsprogramme für Lehrpersonen. In BMBWF (ed.), Nationaler Bildungsbericht Österreich 2024 (pp. 379-423). BMBWF. Helm, C., Hagenauer, G., Altrichter, H., Soukup-Altrichter, K. (2025). Satisfaction and general well-being of Austrian student teachers who enter the teaching profession while studying. European Journal of Teacher Education, 48 (1), 153–177 https://doi.org/10.1080/02619768.2024.2433586 Pauling, S. (2023). Forschungsüberblick zu Lehrkräften in Schulentwicklungsprozessen. Springer VS. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-43604-9_2 Porsch, R., Reintjes, C. & Bellenberg, G. (2025). Heterogen qualifizierte Lehrpersonen an Schulen in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz. In R. Porsch, C. Reintjes & G. Bellenberg (eds.), Heterogen qualifizierte Lehrpersonen an Schulen in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz (pp.7-28). Waxmann. UNESCO (2024). Global Report on Teachers: Addressing teacher shortages and transforming the profession. Paris: UNESCO. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000388832

Teacher shortages continues to be a global challenge (UNESCO, 2024) impacting schools’ instructional capacity and leadership. While contextual determinants such as rurality and socioeconomic factors matter (McHenry-Sorber & Campbell, 2019; Wrona et al., 2025), other relevant factors relevant vary considerably across contexts. Implementing one-size-fits-all policies against teacher shortage thus risks ignoring local, municipal-level variation, especially in multi-level governance systems where municipalities mediate between national and regional policy and individual schools. Yet, the relative importance of municipal structural conditions versus school-specific organizational responses remains unclear. Do municipal characteristics determine shortage (quantitative or qualitative, see (Donitsa-Schmidt & Zuzovsky, 2016), or do schools operating under similar structural conditions experience and manage shortages differently? This study examines how municipal context and school-level factors shape teacher shortage and principals' perceived burden using survey data from 189 schools in 139 municipalities in the Canton of Bern, Switzerland. A three-stage modeling strategy separates municipal from school level effects. Stage 1 estimates municipal-level predictors of teacher shortage (N = 139), showing that fiscal capacity and educational attainment significantly predict qualified teacher shortage (β = 0.25, p < 0.001 and β = -0.25, p = 0.005, respectively), but together explain only modest variance (R² = 0.10). Stage 2 models (N = 179-189) examine school-level processes. First, context-predicted shortage (from Stage 1) shows moderate associations with school-reported shortage (β = 0.18-0.25). Second, school-level shortage influences perceived burden: qualified teacher shortage substantially increases burden (β = 0.49, p < 0.001), while perceived autonomy modestly reduces it (β = -0.12, p = 0.009). Principal experience shows no meaningful association with these outcomes. Stage 3 employs variance decomposition, revealing that 71% of total shortage variance lies between municipalities and 29% within municipalities, yet within- and between-municipality standard deviations are nearly equal (ratio = 0.91). This indicates that municipal context strongly structures baseline risk, but schools within the same municipality still differ substantially. In other words, what schools “make” of their structural conditions matters as much as the municipal conditions themselves. These findings challenge structural determinism in teacher shortage research. While municipal context matters, school-level responses matter equally or more. The non-significance of principal experience, combined with the strong roles of perceived autonomy and of personnel management, suggests that how principals perceive and enact their role shapes their perceived burden. Future research should explore whether these differential school-level responses lead to varying implementations of regional policies and identify what organizationally distinguishes resilient schools.

Donitsa-Schmidt, S., & Zuzovsky, R. (2016). Quantitative and qualitative teacher shortage and the turnover phenomenon. International Journal of Educational Research, 77, 83–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2016.03.005 McHenry-Sorber, E., & Campbell, M. (2019). Teacher shortage as a local phenomenon: District leader sensemaking, responses, and implications for policy. Education Policy Analysis Archives. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.27.4413 UNESCO. (2024). Global report on teachers: addressing teacher shortages and transforming the profession (International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030). https://doi.org/10.54675/figu8035 Wrona, S., Gajderowicz, T., & Jakubowski, M. (2025). How to keep teachers in a profession in times of budget shortages? European Journal of Teacher Education, 48(1), 178–199. https://doi.org/10.1080/02619768.2025.2454635