Context
Teacher attrition remains a pressing challenge in many education systems worldwide despite the many longstanding policy and research initiatives aimed at addressing the challenge. Excessive teacher attrition has negative effects on student learning, the working conditions of those teachers who stay in their schools and the chances of allocating typically stretched education finances most productively.

Research Objectives
This study had three objectives. The first was to provide a comprehensive summary of factors that previous research has associated with teacher retention decisions. Following Cochrane guidelines, a review of research reviews was conducted, to accomplish this first goal.

The second objective was to provide a theoretical account of how teachers make career decisions, in general. To achieve this objective, an education-specific adaptation of Social Cognitive Career Theory (Ed-SCCT) was developed.

Our third objective was to align the retention factors identified by the review of reviews with the constructs included in that theory. Results demonstrate that the school organization itself contains many of the ingredients that prompt teachers to leave their schools, as well as their profession. The status of these ingredients is largely malleable and the nature of a school’s leadership figures strongly in determining whether they attract or repel teachers.

A School-Oriented Adaptation of Social Cognitive Career Theory (Ed-SCCT)
Adopting a social cognitive perspective on how teacher career decisions are made, our school-oriented framework owes a large debt to Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), especially the work of Lent and his colleagues (e.g., Lent et al., 2000, 2002). Exemplifying many of the features of positive psychology (Seligman, 2002), SCCT is rooted in social constructivist assumptions encompassed in general social cognitive theory (e.g., Bandura, 1986) about the agency of individuals in shaping their own behaviour.

A hallmark of SCCT has been efforts to better understanding conditions – both objective and perceived environmental conditions – that facilitate or limit the exercise of human agency in career development (Lent & Brown, 2019). Additionally, SCCT’s theoretical roots in social cognitive rather than social learning theory have resulted in its strong conceptual focus upon better understanding the sociocultural, economic and policy conditions that shape the working conditions and learning opportunities to which individuals are exposed as well as the specific cognitive, self-regulatory, and motivational mediators through which work experiences influence their career behaviour and choices (Lent et al., 2002).

Ed-SCCT builds on the fundamental premises of SCCT but interprets several of its variables differently (Teachers’ Motivational States) while several others have no direct parallel in SCCT (Teacher Well-Being and Job Satisfaction). Reflecting a considerable amount of school-specific evidence (e.g., Day et al., 2024; Grissom et al., 2021), School Leadership is positioned to plays an, as yet, underappreciated role in accounting for teacher retention.

A Review of Reviews about Factors influencing Teacher Retention This review of reviews followed the methodological guidance and expectations for Cochrane overviews of reviews (Pollock et al., 2023), using explicit and systematic methods to search for and identify published reviews related to teacher retention between 2013 and 2023. Search strategy We reviewed existing reviews conducted from 2013 to 2023, which cover the topic of teacher retention. To identify those reviews, we searched a wide range of databases using a of keywords relating to teacher retention. We searched within the document title, abstract and keywords in August 2023. We have also conducted a manual search in key journals publishing reviews as well as a manual search in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. Inclusion criteria For a study to be included in our analysis, it had to meet the following criteria: • Published in English language • Published between 2013 and 2023 (the primary evidence included the selected reviews however goes back to 1980s) • Peer-reviewed journal article • Review of empirical studies, including quantitative, qualitative, and/or mixed methods research • Teachers in schools as a population of interest • Focus on factors influencing teacher retention and attrition • A clear description of a search strategy and inclusion/exclusion criteria for articles, so that we were able to map the nature and breadth of the evidence covered in the reviews and assess these reviews for relevance and quality. Screening A two-step screening was conducted to identify the relevant reviews to answer our research questions. After removal of duplicates, papers were screened based on their title and abstract and then full text resulting in the selection of 17 reviews for further analysis. Quality assurance The assessment criteria drawn from the AMSTART tool (Shea et al., 2017) and other systematic overviews of reviews (e.g., Smith et al., 2011) were used to examine the extent to which the evidence presented in each of our selected reviews was of sufficient quality and trustworthiness to support their conclusions. Application of these quality assessment criteria resulted in the selection of nine reviews for more detailed analysis, three of which are meta-analyses. Analytical approach Analysis of results reported in the nine reviews included coding of individual factors identified as influences on teacher retention and the classification of those factors into categories associated with the variables included in our Ed-SCCT.

Results: Understanding Teacher Retention Decisions Using Ed-SCCT Our review provided a lengthy list of factors (109) associated with teacher retention decisions. However, none of these factors, alone or in combination, begins to capture the complex process that links even the most “significant” (according to research) factor with a decision by teachers to move schools or leave the teaching profession. One of the most important features of the theory used in this paper to understand how teacher retention decisions are made is its reflection of evidence about both the processes and variables associated with teachers’ career decision making, in general, and evidence from the review of reviews about factors identified as most influential in teachers’ retention decisions, in particular. Combining these two sources of evidence has two advantages: it provides more coherent explanations for the nature and size of the effects of factors identified by retention research, and it has the potential to identify other important factors that retention research has yet to reveal. New findings indicate the significance of school organisation in retaining teachers and demonstrate the value of using social theory to explain how different retention factors and conditions interact to influence teachers’ decision to move schools or leave teaching. The current state of teacher retention research is data rich but theoretically underdeveloped. Our review identifies four features of the evidence base which undermine the likelihood or its value to educational practitioners and policymakers and provide recommendations for future research: 1) direct empirical testing of social theory to explain the dynamic complexity underpinning retention; 2) addressing the missing evidence about the role of teachers’ personal goals in their retention decisions; 3) reducing variation in conceptions, methodology and outcomes that currently contributes to the challenge of interpreting results; 4) unpacking what effective school leaders actually do to retain teachers.

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