Although the link between the teaching workforce and the quality of education has been strongly asserted, and teachers have come to the forefront of the global educational policy agenda (Tatto, 2007), the teaching profession is becoming less attractive as a career choice. Higher expectations in terms of student outcomes, greater pressures combined with rapid technological innovation (Eurydice, 2018), coupled with the decline in the relative social and economic status of the teaching profession (Farges, 2011) have led to severe teacher shortages in many education systems. 

As a consequence, teacher career reforms and the development of new career models are thought as a potentially powerful lever to address the lack of attractiveness of teaching profession. Governments have tried to transform teachers’ careers, looking for ways to diversify career structures (Tournier et al., 2019). For instance, in contrast to first-generation career models or ‘flat’ careers (promoting teachers based on seniority and experience), second- generation (or multi-level) career structures offer performance-based incentives. These incentives can include systems of salary progression contingent upon appraisal, but also new career ladders (Tournier et al., 2019). In addition, about one third of European education systems offer new entry routes or alternative pathways to a teaching qualification, usually designed around short professional-oriented programmes and/or employment-based training (Eurydice, 2018). 

In this context, it is of crucial importance to understand the choices that teachers make in their careers and the role of institutional factors in determining the recruitment of teachers, their allocation across schools and their professional trajectories. It is also crucial to question the effect of these new career structures and entry points, along with their underlying assumptions. For instance, the increasing diversity in the teacher workforce (entering through different routes) along with the fragmentation of educational systems in terms of educational provision (establishment of privately-run, state-funded schools, such as free schools and academies), could produce more differentiated educational contexts affecting the professional identity of educational professionals, but also students’ access to learning. 

Recruitment, attrition and mobility issues are currently mainly analysed by emphasizing the personal characteristics of teachers and the organizational characteristics of schools as working environments, overemphasising the role of individual preferences and organisational features (Voisin & Dumay, 2020).

Therefore, there is a need for a fresh perspective encompassing employment and working conditions, labour market regulation, entry routes into the profession, various forms of mobility patterns, anchored in empirical analyses. A comparative perspective is also needed to not only point out cross-national similarities and differences but also what accounts for between-countries variations. 

This symposium will contribute to the existing debate on the attractiveness of the teaching profession, and to the burgeoning literature on teachers and teaching in international and comparative contexts (Sorensen & Dumay, in press). It provides a comparative perspective looking at a diversity of countries, covering contrasted types in terms of models of regulation of the profession – bureaucratic, market-oriented and professional models – shaping the way teacher education, labour markets, and the division of labour are organised and regulated in different contexts (Voisin & Dumay, 2020).

This symposium approaches teachers’ careers from three interrelated perspectives: 

-       Institutionally embedded employment systems and reform trajectories: analysing teachers’ careers can help reveal the shape that such reforms take in different contexts, and understand the dynamics of the labour markets (e.g. segmentation, closure, embeddedness, etc.) as well as the interdependencies among phenomena;

-       Individual trajectories, and the different forms of mobility (intra-, inter-professional and geographical mobility) and adjustments that underpin career commitments, revealing differentiated ways to be a teacher;

-       Careers and their implications for education, pedagogy, and pupils. 

Eurydice (2018). Teaching Careers in Europe: Access, Progression and Support. Eurydice Report. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. Farges, G. (2011). Le statut social des enseignants français. Revue européenne des sciences sociales, 49-41. Sorensen, T.B. and Dumay, X. (forthcoming). The teaching professions and globalization. A scoping review of the Anglophone research literature. Comparative Education Review. Tatto, Maria Teresa. 2007. “International comparisons and the global reform of teaching.” In Reforming teaching globally, ed. M.T. Tatto. Oxford: Symposium. Tournier, B., Chimier, C., Childress, D., & Raudonytė, I. (2019). Teacher career reforms: Learning from experience. Paris: UNESCO, International Institute for Educational Planning Voisin, A., & Dumay, X. (2020). How do educational systems regulate the teaching profession and teachers’ work? A typological approach to institutional foundations and models of regulation. Teaching and Teacher Education.