Once-in-a-decade opportunity: bolstered Professional Standards will attract and retain more teachers

There are commonly cited causes: workload, salary and the status of teaching.  

This is reinforced by data from prospective teachers who cite a perceived lack of intellectual challenge, recognition, leadership opportunities and poor salary trajectories.

However, in discussions about how best to keep good teachers in the profession for longer – and to attract top graduates to the classroom – there is a bigger issue, rarely named, but more profound which unifies discrete attraction and retention drivers. This is the erosion of teachers’ professional identity.

What is professional identity?

Professional identity refers to how individuals see themselves within their profession and the value they attach to that role.

A strong teacher professional identity is predicated on clear distinctions between what teachers versus non-teachers should know (ie. clear professional boundaries) and a belief that the work of a teacher is meaningful, important and impactful (with mechanisms for defining and recognising meaning and expertise).

The notion of teaching as a profession has a long history in Australian education policy. The 1973 Karmel report was amongst the first to refer to professionalism in the context of teaching. It describes professions as those in which practitioners define their own standards, prestige and boundaries of practice.

In other words, a profession is one in which those who practice it determine what is required to join, how to remain current, what good practice looks like.

An untapped lever for teacher retention

Professional identity appears to be a powerful, often overlooked lever for teacher retention. We know from international research that teachers’ professional identity predicts satisfaction and retention.

The implication is clear. When the professional experience of teachers is not valued, when there is a perception of poor reward, and when there are insufficient mechanisms for growth (for example, via mentorship and other continuing supports), it becomes increasingly difficult for teachers to believe that their work is making the difference they intend it to.

In this context, the incentives to become a teacher or to remain in the profession become increasingly sparse.

Recent evidence highlights the importance of understanding teacher retention in nuanced ways: there is a difference between teachers who stay in the profession but change schools, and teachers who leave the profession entirely.

There is also a difference between teachers’ intentions to leave and those who actually leave (ie. attrition).

A recent meta-analysis from Gudlach and colleagues drew on data from more than three million teachers and synthesised the factors associated with teachers’ intention to leave, intention to stay, actually leaving, and actually staying in the job.

We conducted an additional review of these results (in which we considered only the factors associated whether a teacher actually stayed or left AND those factors which were not associated with an effect size of 0).

Some of these factors which were meaningfully associated with actually staying or leaving were demographic (eg. teacher and student characteristics). However, several others describe key features of professional identity:

• Job satisfaction
• The nature of the work
• Mentoring
• Salary
• Status of the profession
• Academic standard of students

The key from this is that the factors with the strongest association with teacher retention are also those most closely associated with strong professions.

Effective mentoring, meaningful working conditions, competitive remuneration, elevated professional status, and intellectually rewarding work are not peripheral concerns. They are central to whether teachers actually stay or leave the profession, and have been shown to be amongst the strongest predictors of student achievement.

The English Charted College of Teachers’ model of professionalism (2024) is useful for mapping these factors. This model recognises that professional identity lies at the heart of teacher recruitment and retention.

It argues that professional status emerges when teachers are recognised as experts with specific knowledge and skills, are trusted to exercise professional judgment, and contribute to the ongoing development of knowledge within their field.

A key feature of this model is that it champions the important role of research-informed practice alongside practice-informed research. In other words, a key driver of strong professional identity depends on recognition of classroom expertise.

Australia has also explored policy reforms aligned with this vision. A 2022 NSW policy initiative came very close to creating professional structures for teachers that would recognise professional expertise of leading practitioners alongside that of deputy principals.

Such models acknowledge that recognising expert teaching could provide meaningful career pathways for teachers.

From left, James Pengelley, Dr Zid Mancenido and Penny Van Bergen warn that the current professional standards lack critical detail about the specific knowledge and skills teachers need to demonstrate professional expertise at different career levels. They say adding greater specificity will improve our ability to attract and retain exceptional teachers and draw top candidates into the profession. 

The role of teaching standards

This discussion of professional identity is even more important as the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers are currently under review.

According to the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL), the primary role of the standards is that they serve a “public statement of what constitutes teacher quality”.

They define the work of teachers and “contribute to the professionalisation of teaching and raise the status of the profession”.

Professional standards form the basis upon which teachers build professional identity because they serve as benchmarks for registration, employment, and they guide professional conversations and day-to-day work. 

AITSL’s review is the first opportunity the profession has had to strengthen the standards since they were released in 2011. Although initial consultations with the profession have now been completed, a second round of consultations will begin in November 2026.

This round of consultation will involve a discussion paper outlining key research insights and questions to support deeper feedback. Teachers, school leaders, and school community members will be able to respond through an online survey or a written submission.

From our perspective, we see a valuable opportunity for strengthening the Teacher Standards by increasing the specificity of knowledge that is needed to demonstrate professional expertise across a teaching career.

We believe that without this specificity, the Teacher Standards limit the potential for developing stronger professional identities.

Increasing this specificity will improve our ability to attract and retain top teachers and teaching candidates.

The Standards provide career development pathways

In Australia, AITSL data shows a drop in teacher satisfaction and retention after five years of teaching, with some improvement among those who remain beyond a decade. Stronger and clearer professional pathways during this period could help sustain motivation and reduce attrition.

Revised professional standards should consider how to describe the sorts of advanced professional skills, knowledge, and dispositions that energise and enable career-long professional trajectories for classroom teachers.

There are international examples that do this well, such as the various levels within specialised career tracks found in the Singaporean education system.

A benefit of these revisions across all career levels may be greater recognition for our most experienced teachers. For example, more than 20 per cent of UK teachers and roughly 4 per cent of teachers in the US have completed high-level professional certification or accreditation.

By comparison, roughly 0.4 per cent of Australian teachers have achieved Highly Accomplished or Lead certification.

Features like this enable teachers to develop sophisticated expertise while remaining in classroom-focused roles.

The standards define professional knowledge

We see a key opportunity for the Australian Teacher Standards to define what exactly makes effective teaching and learning happen. 

The current standards are high-level and aspirational, but lack detail about the specific knowledge and skills teachers need to demonstrate professional expertise at different career levels.

For example, Focus Area 1.2 states that a ‘Proficient’ teacher should “structure teaching programs using research and collegial advice about how students learn”, while a ‘Highly Accomplished’ teacher should “expand understanding of how students learn using research and workplace knowledge”.

Missing from this is key detail about the cognitive mechanisms of learning, attention and memory and how they inform effective teaching approaches across different ages, disciplines and learning contexts.

This is important professional knowledge that distinguishes teaching as a profession, and specifying it within the Teacher Standards will better enable teachers to identify themselves as experts within this domain. Such specification will also decrease the risk of teachers propagating faith in ineffective teaching strategies based on debunked neuromyths.

There has been some concern in Australia that the application of cognitive science to education has been used to justify an oppressive and hegemonic evidence-based regime. Here, we can learn from other contexts which have already walked this path: The result of providing specificity around this kind of professional knowledge has been the empowerment of teachers to make better professional decisions about how to apply research to their own context.

Additionally, Focus Area 5.1 states that a ‘Proficient’ teacher should “develop, select and use informal and formal, diagnostic, formative and summative assessment strategies to assess student learning”.

The research base on what exact assessment practices significantly improve student outcomes has expanded considerably since this standard was developed, and there is an opportunity to further guide what current and contemporary professional knowledge in this space should look like.

The Teacher Standards could therefore go further by addressing more complex content like standardised test construction, principles of validity, feedback and scaling in explicit ways within the standards, creating clearer pathways for professional growth. 

The question is really how ambitious do we want the standards of professional practice (and thus the potential for career-long growth) for our teachers to be?

Getting the professional standards right represents more than a technical policy exercise. It is a once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen the professional identity of teachers, enhance the status of teaching, and create conditions that attract talented graduates and encourage experienced teachers to stay.

If Australia wants more people to choose teaching, rebuilding the profession’s identity may be one of the most powerful places to start.