With almost a third of teachers leaving the profession within 5 years of starting, it is clear they need more support: Better systems, and better training.

The latest Department for Education survey (published June 8th 2023) found that in the academic year 2021/22 39,930 teachers left teaching for reasons other than retirement, 8.8% of the sector. Within this group, teachers in the first years of their careers were overrepresented when compared to their more experienced peers (12.8% leave after a year following their initial training, a third leave within 5 years). I left in December 2023 after two years and a term at a Hastings school.

I cannot speak for teachers generally. My account is personal and anecdotal. Teachers quit for many reasons not be captured here, but in my experience, the primary source of teacher dissatisfaction came from staff feeling regularly unsuccessful at their jobs. Long-hours are often cited as a main teacher grievance, and, though some teachers do work longer hours than they are paid, with few breaks, perhaps these working hours would feel tolerable if staff felt like it resulted in sustained and noticeable success. Pay is the other oft cited reason for poor teacher retention, and the profession is undervalued. But, after 2 years experience following university, I was on a contract worth £37,000 a year. This is at least competitive with other industries in the area.

But for many teaching is a vocation in which positive impact, not pay, is the primary motivation, making perceived lack of success particularly painful. Teachers can feel helpless; that the problems are systemic within the school, or a sense of personal failure; that the teacher themselves are responsible. Both are tiring, unsustainable conclusions.

I observed two qualities which enabled teachers to maintain a positive relationship to their job; either they were good at it and were sustained by their evident success, or, possessing a wide-angled view of their professional impact, were able to trace a net-positive despite inevitable daily setbacks. I hope to explain why both qualities are difficult to attain, particularly for the inexperienced teachers leaving the profession at the fastest rate.

Being good at teaching, the first quality, is difficult and the punishment for failure cruel. Teaching requires the use of multiple techniques which take time and discipline to perfect. Even the most basic condition necessary for learning, gaining and maintaining the purposeful focus of students in a classroom, requires these techniques to come together simultaneously; New knowledge has to be introduced in small sequenced chunks, but returned to regularly so students remember them. Learning should be pitched to challenge but provide regular opportunities for success. Language must be consistent and economical or its meaning will be lost. Behaviour must be managed through a toolkit of routine teacher responses which establish a positive classroom ‘climate’: A healthy and consistent relationship between sanction and reward which is clear to the students and reliably nudges them to make the right decision for their learning. Tone of voice, classroom position, body language, non-verbal gestures are all other, subtle techniques through which the climate is set. But the potential pitfalls are numerous, and to an inexperienced and/or less than expert teacher focus in the room feels delicate and insecure; think ‘spinning plates’. It takes years of classroom teaching, and dedicated practise for the focus to feel stable, and this occurs only when these multiple techniques become automatic. It is difficult to create a climate inclusively positive for all thirty students. The best teachers do, and deserve enormous respect. They manage to appear consistent while managing the variety of student needs before them. The result is student trust; that the rules are fair and have their best interest in mind.

Mastery of any profession is difficult. Perhaps more particular to teaching, then, is the punishment for lack of mastery. The learning curve is steep, which means less-than-expert teachers like myself can find themselves working in negative classroom climates, ending most days feeling the need to purge the emotional residue of multiple negative interactions. In a negative classroom climate, the roles of teachers and students are oppositional. It can be created when any single one of the above techniques are not executed effectively; a poorly planned lesson which asks students to use skills which are not fully learned can result in failure and mutual frustration, an inconsistently executed approach to behaviour creates a sense of injustice, a clumsily worded phrase causes confusion and a loss of focus, poor teacher positioning in the classroom leads to sections of the room feeling unaccountable, and free to distract.

Part of the trade-off of striving for consistency is that teachers can seem mechanical and dehumanised in the eyes of students, giving students license to project their frustrations, which can result in conflict and abuse. I found the compound nature of student abuse particularly difficult; the stress at being shouted at, insulted or threatened, compounded by the belief that it reflects something you’ve done wrong. A school leader once told me not to focus on the ‘black dot in the white page’, the only negative in an otherwise positive experience, but I found this challenging. I found the black dot difficult to ignore when the black dot is an event as stark as receiving abuse in a classroom, incidents so disruptive that though they come from very few students, the impact is class-wide; the black dot turns the whole room grey. Though negative experiences at work are not unique to teaching, perhaps the intense interpersonal conflict, which the profession shares with other social services; nursing, social care, policing etc, leaves a deeper scar.

There is then the second challenge to enjoy teaching: Possessing a wide-angled appreciation of personal success. There are several potential barriers to this. One is that the effort you put in does not reap immediate rewards. The best teachers are patient, and delay gratification knowing what they are doing will do good in the long run. If focussed on the immediate, the gains feel marginal, and the relationship between effort and success non-proportional. There are so many variables which are outside teacher control, namely the students and their idiosyncrasies which can intervene at any moment, that hours of preparation can prove fruitless.

Tracking personal success is also difficult because teaching is a team game, so responsibility for outcomes is always dispersed among the staff body. This is necessary: Schools must function as coherent, mechanical, all-pervasive systems to be successful. But all-pervasive systems are also difficult to achieve, especially following prior failure. When two members of staff enforce the system differently, the system is undermined. I was certainly guilty of turning a blind eye to infractions at times, on things like equipment or uniform, in order to avoid a highly charged confrontation, but it is also the responsibility of school leaders to make the school system crystal clear and unchanging to staff, so they can act with confidence. Frequent wholesale changes to systems also undermines them; In my 2 years and a term, the school underwent several. Though well-intentioned, with every rule change both staff and students were more likely to view systems as arbitrary, rather than normative, and adherence became less likely.

If poor teacher retention stems from teachers lacking experiences of success, what can be done? Inexperienced teachers need strong systems to support them. Weak school systems mean teachers use time and energy to achieve the most fundamental things such as attention and compliance. Without student trust that the system will work as it should, teachers are isolated, wielding only their own individual classroom command, which varies significantly with experience and expertise. Again, less-than-expert teachers accumulate daily conflict. In my experience, repeated cycles of failure and replacement meant, collectively, staff and students lost confidence in their meaning. If systems are to succeed, they need to be clear, and they need to last. Consistent and strong leadership is essential to achieve this.

And if lack of expertise is particularly punishing in teaching, how can young teachers be better supported? I’m critical of teacher training providers, namely Teach First. As a Teach First trainee myself, I was given a 70% timetable on my first day at school having never taught in a classroom, and having received minimal training. Though some thrive, others, like me, drown in a deluge of negative experiences, creating a mass of black dots which can hinder ones ability to think ‘this might be the profession for me’. Training programmes provided through higher education introduce new teachers gradually to coal-face classroom teaching and place greater emphasis on learning the necessary skills first. This, in my experience, provides greater early opportunities for success, and is reflected in the retention statistics: The National Foundation of Education Research found the retention rate for Teach First teachers one year after completing their NQT was 69%, compared to 87% for teachers trained through HE.

Teaching is hard. Teachers need the support of secure systems to feel successful. Without them, it is a stressful job, one which can feel like it primarily constitutes internalising conflict, rather than teaching and inspiring young people. Early career teachers need to be nurtured towards mastery of the profession, and shown the joy that is possible within it.