Many Anglosphere nations are in the midst of a teacher shortage crisis. In all of these, the historically hardest-to-staff schools are struggling to find enough teachers to teach their students. While UNESCO has declared teaching shortages as a global crisis (Ovenden-Hope, 2022), and teaching workforce shortages are concerning across Europe as well as throughout the US (Federičová,2021) it is useful to examine this phenomenon of teaching shortages in ‘like’ Anglosphere nations with a shared language, geopolitics and social contexts (Legrand, 2021, p. 12).   Fuelled by rising student numbers, difficult workplace demands and conditions, an ageing workforce and declining enrolments in initial teacher education programs, the current shortage is placing schools and teachers at breaking point, severely impacting the commitment to deliver a world class education. While the teacher shortage is a system wide issue, its effects are most strongly felt in geographically or socio-economically marginalised communities, those served by the hardest-to-staff schools, where the difficulty of finding qualified teachers is disproportionately impacting on the educational opportunities and student outcomes. Attracting and retaining quality teachers is therefore an urgent priority for all education systems, and solutions need to be found to address the high rates of attrition, particularly among pre-service and in-service early career teachers who are at the highest risk of leaving the profession. With insufficient numbers of new teachers to replenish the ageing workforce, the capacity of schools to support the educational engagement and attainment of students is, and will continue to be, profoundly impacted.

This symposium brings together four papers from research in England and Australia examining the issue of teacher retention. Each paper addresses the common research question: What are the factors impacting current and extreme teaching workforce issues and how can a better understanding of these issues influence educational policy to attract, prepare and retain teachers in these uncertain times?  Two of these papers focus on particular cohorts of teachers who are at risk of leaving the profession, considering how current policy and practices are contributing towards the high rates of attrition among precariously employed early career teachers and career change teachers. The third explores the impact of Ofsted on teacher attrition as one example of the increasingly neoliberal education policy environmentin England. The fourth paper in this symposium focuses on teacher retention to examine how teachers remaining in the hardest to staff schools are managing under conditions outside of their control. The symposium will generate insight into why teachers are choosing to leave the profession, how they manage their work when they stay and offer opportunities to identify potential solutions which can address this major educational crisis.

Federičová, M. (2021). Teacher turnover: What can we learn from Europe?. European Journal of Education, 56(1), 102-116. Legrand, T. (2021). Political-Cultural Propinquity in the Anglosphere. In The Architecture of Policy Transfer (pp. 107–128). Springer International Publishing. Ovenden-Hope, T. (2022). A status-based crisis of teacher shortages? Research in Teacher Education. Vol.12. No 1. Nov 2022.