Britain's Teacher Crisis: Why New Teachers Leave

Dr Tim Yan

“I can no longer remember the last time I had a serious conversation with my husband.”

A primary-school teacher said this during an online training course I attended in Britain. She had two children of her own. Each day felt like a campaign: an unending list of demands at school, followed by caring responsibilities at home. Over the month-long course we were often placed in the same group. Even through a screen, her exhaustion was unmistakable—in the shadows beneath her eyes, their persistent redness and the strain in her voice.

She nevertheless kept attending. Around two-thirds of the teachers on the course could not remain for every session because incidents at school intervened. They arrived late, left early or disappeared briefly to deal with a problem in their classrooms.

Thirteen subjects, and a job without edges

Primary teachers in England are generalists. One teacher may be responsible for as many as thirteen curriculum areas. Matteo, who led our training group, was an experienced state-primary teacher and also worked with new trainees on a university PGCE course.

Seeing our apprehension, he tried to reassure us. We did not have to become specialists in every subject, he said. Beyond the core subjects of English, mathematics and science, there were flexible ways to plan and draw on support.

The reassurance did not alter the weight of the job. Teaching is only one part of it. Assessment, reporting, safeguarding, planning and other administrative tasks expand well beyond the hours written into a contract. Evenings and weekends are routinely absorbed by lesson preparation and evaluation.

For teachers at the beginning of their careers, the pressure is particularly acute. They are still learning to manage a classroom while producing evidence, meeting standards and mastering a new institution's routines. The distance between the ideal of teaching and the conditions in which it is practised can be brutal. Some leave for work that pays more; others simply look for a life with clearer boundaries.

The official retention figures make the attrition visible. Of the teachers who qualified in England in 2024, 89.7 per cent were still teaching in the state-funded sector a year later. Among those who had qualified three years earlier, 75.8 per cent remained; after five years, the figure was 67.4 per cent. In 2024/25, 38,632 full-time-equivalent qualified teachers left the sector—8.5 per cent of the total workforce.

The title of a “teacher crisis” can therefore mislead. The problem is not only finding people willing to enter the classroom. It is constructing a profession in which good people can stay.

How the shortage became entrenched

On 28 February 2023, thousands of teachers marched in Manchester over pay, workload and working conditions. The dispute was the visible expression of a problem that had accumulated over many years.

Demand for teachers increased during the expansion and reform of education from the late 1990s, particularly in mathematics, science and modern languages. Later, tighter public finances, rising pupil numbers in some urban areas and persistent workload pressures made recruitment and retention harder. By the middle of the 2010s, many schools were struggling to keep experienced staff and to fill posts in shortage subjects or less advantaged areas.

The pandemic added another layer. Some experienced teachers retired sooner than expected; others reconsidered whether the emotional and administrative burden of the job was sustainable. Salary matters, especially in high-cost parts of the country, but the reasons for leaving are rarely reducible to pay alone. Time, autonomy, support and the accumulated strain of responsibility all count.

Vacancy figures have begun to fall from their recent peak, but that is not the same as resolving the underlying problem. A school may fill a timetable while still relying heavily on early-career teachers, non-specialist cover or staff who are already close to exhaustion.

Can international recruitment solve it?

Government responses have included higher starting salaries, bursaries in shortage subjects, workload initiatives and efforts to recruit teachers from overseas. International recruitment can fill genuine gaps and bring valuable experience into schools. It cannot, by itself, repair the conditions that cause teachers to leave.

Early-career support is decisive. Formal induction and mentoring exist, but their quality depends on whether a school has the time and experienced staff to provide them. A programme can look generous on paper and still fail a novice teacher confronting disruptive behaviour, an overloaded timetable or a class whose needs exceed the resources available.

During the first week of my PGCE, I was struck by how much of the training sounded like advice for survival. One tutor put it plainly: “This will be one of the most challenging and unforgettable years of your life.”

Among trainees there was a darker joke: if you had never cried or broken down, you had not really experienced a PGCE.

It was a joke, but not a harmless one. The PGCE is demanding because teaching is demanding. Full-time new teachers encounter the harder reality: relentless planning, responsibility for children's welfare and progress, work that follows them home, and support that can be too thin precisely when it is most needed.

Every lesson shapes a life—but who sustains the teacher?

The government's teacher-recruitment campaign uses the line “Every lesson shapes a life.” It is true. A lesson can alter the direction of a child's life. That truth also places an extraordinary moral weight on the young graduate standing at the front of the room.

Many of the trainees beside me were recent graduates with a grounded sense of what teaching involved. They liked children. They cared about education. One of them, a young woman named Felsha, had spent her gap year in a primary school and was certain that this was the work she wanted to do.

It is people like her whom the system is most at risk of losing in their first few years.

The question is not whether their idealism is genuine. It is whether schools and government will stop treating that idealism as an inexhaustible resource. If every lesson can shape a life, then retaining the person who teaches it is not an administrative concern. It is one of the central educational questions of our time.

About the author

Dr Tim Yan is a philosopher and teacher educator specialising in Philosophy for Children and comparative education. He has taught in Guangzhou, Shanghai and London, and writes on the institutions and everyday practices that shape children's lives.

Sources

- Department for Education, School workforce in England, 2024/25 (published 2026): https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-workforce-in-england/2025