While extensive research has already been done on why teachers leave the profession (See et. al., 2020) very little research has been conducted on the consequences or impact of teacher attrition on the school leaders and teachers who are left behind in schools that have high teacher turnover or ‘teacher churn’. These consequences relate to areas such as well-being and emotional labour (Day & Hong, 2016), workload issues including teaching ‘out of field’ (Du Plessis 2019), the future and changing nature of teachers’ work (Stacey et. al., 2020), teacher burn-out (Rajendran et al., 2020), teachers’ job satisfaction and career aspirations and trajectories. Each of these areas relates in some way to teachers’ retention and allows us to examine more closely a topic of both great urgency and one that is currently under-researched. In this paper we examine the impact of teaching shortages on three teachers who have remained in their jobs while many of their colleagues have left. These initial interviews form part of a larger study collecting work stories from teachers in schools that have experienced more than 10% teacher turnover over a period of twelve months to understand how teaching shortages have impacted on their daily work including the flow-on effect of teacher shortages on individual teachers, their classroom practice and on system functions, such as their abilities to teach effectively, their sense of efficacy and satisfaction, curriculum, human resources, workforce planning, relationships, well-being, and accountability, and how and why, despite these conditions, they have stayed. When combined and brought together these interviews constitute “purposeful conversations” (Edwards, 1999) and give a sense of a ‘day in the life’ of these teachers in high-turnover schools. As such they enable us to look beyond merely the classroom practices of those interviewed for these teachers were invited to interpret their daily work through narrative and the introspective provision in the form of “telling and retelling experiences they have lived, and are living” (Clandinin et al., 2011 p. 34). The use of narrative analysis (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990, Huber et al 2013) is critical in this process for this enabled us to closely analyse these teachers’ discourses, their own retelling of daily movements and practices and their work habits in and out of the classroom and allow us to document their retelling/enactment of their work in challenging high-turnover school settings.

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