When we talk about teacher retention, we often talk about the familiar culprits: workload, behaviour, accountability. But lurking behind these headlines is another factor that may matter more than we appreciate: the profession’s inflexibility to let teachers be anything other than teachers.
What if we started to view teaching as part of a broader professional identity? What if we accepted and embraced the possibility that teachers might thrive (and stay) if they had flexibility to do other things alongside?
Master teachers
In Singapore, different teaching tracks enable teachers to stay in the classroom while getting involved in wider education work. ‘Master Teachers’ play a significant role in shaping education policy, leading professional development, driving curricular innovation and supporting pedagogical research – all while still teaching. Their intellectual curiosity is seen as an asset, not a threat.
In contrast, our system often seems suspicious of teachers who want to stretch beyond the classroom. To be involved in wider activities, teachers often need to leave behind the very thing they love: teaching itself.
Over time, this erodes the mindset that brings many into teaching in the first place: the desire to think, to question and to connect teaching to the wider world.
Professional wellbeing
It’s not just about education roles though. People are increasingly entering the profession after successful careers in other fields. Some want to combine teaching with their former roles.
Teachers who stay long-term often find ways to keep that part of themselves alive: directing theatre, writing, researching, working in the community. This should be happening because of our systems, not in spite of them.
As the Church of England’s Flourishing Teachers report suggests, the opportunity to live a “rich and varied work-life” is essential to professional wellbeing. If the fear of losing staff causes us to hold onto them too tight, we will find they only slip through our fingers.
Horizontal growth
The ladder to leadership is not the only form of professional growth. Many teachers are keen to explore their subject in more depth – its curriculum, pedagogy, or its application beyond the school gates.
Chartered teachers from the Chartered College of Teaching told the Teaching Commission that engaging with research and policy in their own classrooms had given them a renewed sense of purpose and connection, and led to broader coordination roles.
Now Teach told us that schools need to welcome the expertise career-changers bring, rather than seeing it as irrelevant (or worse, an inconvenience).
There are also teachers and leaders working part time who work with schools as consultants, or sit on steering groups at the Department for Education.
Recently, Dr Haili Hughes has been appointed as a trust leader alongside a professorship and a DfE role, making her perhaps the only serving professor and school leader in the country.
Opportunities to grow horizontally can only drive up expertise and credibility and, in turn, strengthen the system.
Making it possible
This won’t be a quick fix. Schools are already struggling to recruit teachers, so releasing them to do other things at this point may seem unachievable. Political focus is rightly on making their working lives in school attractive and sustainable first, but a few practical changes could kickstart progress.
Flexible contracts could allow for part-time arrangements to pursue outside work, study or community engagement.
Wider CPD pathways could allow teachers to own their own learning, including research and policy work. For example, engaging teachers in policmaking would enhance teaching and policy alike.
And to support all of this, we need trusting leadership cultures that encourage pursuing interests beyond school, as well as an accountability system that recognises that teacher development is multifaceted.
Retention is complex and issues like behaviour, workload and pay still need urgent attention. However, too many good teachers leave, not because they’re tired of teaching, but because they’re tired of only teaching.
An important piece of the puzzle is to treat teachers like whole people, with lives, passions and ambitions. Let them teach – and do other things too. Rather than ‘Teach First,’ why not ‘Teach And’?
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