In Australia, teaching shortages post-Covid are a growing concern as is the case to varying degrees in many other Anglosphere nations. For instance, Ireland (Geoghegan, 2022), Scotland (Wang & Houston, 2023) and England (Ovenden-Hope, 2022; Perryman, 2022) are all experiencing teacher recruitment problems, as are schools in the US (Bryner, 2021). While workforce issues are most prevalent in certain subject areas and always impact disadvantaged schools most, in all cases, teacher shortages, including teacher attrition, are seen as related to such things as untenable workloads, loss of professionalism and the overall declining status of the teaching profession. This paper reports on some early findings of an Australian Research Council Discovery project that explores the work lives of teachers remaining in schools with very high teacher turnover. In contrast to previous research that has examined the attrition of teachers from hard-to-staff schools through focusing on those who have left teaching, this study aims to develop a broader understanding of the issues of retention by attending instead on its impact on those teachers who remain. In order to understand teachers’ work lives our research aims to disentangle the interplay of the technical, moral, political, and emotional dimensions connected to these teachers’ lives. Our work-storied approach places a high degree of importance on the ‘day in the life’ of teachers who remain in schools experiencing high teacher turnover (>10% attrition in a 12-month period). This involves sculpting interpretations out of verbal accounts and observations of teachers that elucidate how they are managing their work in circumstance outside of their control. In this paper we explain our ‘work-shadowing’ methodology and reflect on what we have learned about the daily, working lives of teachers in two of our high teacher turnover case study schools. By addressing the problem of retention in this way, we aim to advance a much deeper, nuanced understanding of how educational policies and systems, as well as individual schools, can support those teachers who remain in the profession, and thus facilitate greater teacher retention at a time when maintaining support for a declining teaching workforce is urgent.

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