Yet if retention is understood only through the language of workload reduction, schools risk missing a deeper problem: many teachers are not simply leaving because the work is hard; they are leaving because the conditions around the work make it difficult to sustain a professional identity over time.
Before becoming a secondary Mathematics and Science teacher, I worked for more than a decade as a pharmacist across community, hospital and public health settings.
I also managed large healthcare teams during the COVID-19 vaccination rollout. Healthcare and education are different professions, but they share important similarities.
Both are human-centred, high-trust professions. Both rely on judgement, relationships and emotional labour. Both are experiencing workforce strain.
Both also face the challenge of retaining professionals who entered the field with a strong sense of purpose, only to find that purpose gradually eroded by system pressures.
Australia’s teacher workforce challenge is not only a recruitment issue. It is a sustainability issue. While some recent workforce data suggests that early career teacher attrition may be more complex than the widely cited figures of 25–35 per cent leaving within the first five years¹, the broader concern remains clear.
Many teachers are still experiencing burnout, reducing their working fractions, moving into less demanding roles, or questioning whether teaching is sustainable over the long-term.
In this sense, the retention challenge is not only about how many teachers formally leave the profession. It is also about how many remain in the system while feeling increasingly depleted, unsupported or disconnected from the work that first drew them to teaching.
The workforce picture becomes more concerning when future demand is considered. AITSL’s national workforce data shows that the proportion of teachers intending to leave within the next five years increased to 14 per cent in 2023, while a further 17 per cent indicated an intention to leave in five years or more.²
In Victoria, the 2024 Teacher Workforce Snapshot projects a secondary teacher shortfall of around 1,675 teachers by 2030.³
Globally, UNESCO estimates that 44 million primary and secondary teachers will be needed by 2030.⁴
These figures point to a broader reality: teacher retention is not a short-term stabing issue. It is a long-term question of workforce design.
Healthcare offers a useful comparison. In healthcare, workforce retention is rarely understood as one single problem. It is usually viewed through multiple lenses: staffing levels, supervision, burnout, mentoring, clinical governance, career progression, workplace culture and professional identity.
Education would benefit from a similarly layered approach. Retention begins before someone decides to leave. One lesson from healthcare is that retention strategies cannot begin at the point of resignation.
In many healthcare settings, the signs of professional disengagement appear well before someone exits. Staff may remain employed but become emotionally exhausted, professionally isolated or less willing to take on development opportunities.
By the time a resignation letter arrives, the underlying issues have often been present for months or years. The same is true in schools.
A teacher may still be physically present in the classroom while gradually detaching from the profession. They may stop contributing to curriculum discussions, avoid leadership opportunities, withdraw from collegial conversations or quietly decide that teaching is not a sustainable long-term career.
This is why retention should not be reduced to preventing resignations. The deeper question is: what helps teachers continue to see a future for themselves in the profession?
This includes workload, but it also includes recognition, autonomy, collegial trust, leadership support and opportunities to grow.
A teacher who feels that they are developing professionally is more likely to imagine a future in the profession. A teacher who feels stuck, replaceable or unsupported may remain for a time, but their commitment becomes increasingly fragile.
Culture determines how workload is experienced
In both healthcare and education, workplace culture is sometimes discussed as though it is secondary to “real” workforce issues such as pay, staffing and workload.
My experience suggests the opposite. Culture determines how difficult work is experienced. Healthcare can be demanding, unpredictable and emotionally intense. Yet I have seen staff remain in difficult roles when they felt trusted, supported and respected.
I have also seen staff leave roles that were technically manageable because the workplace culture made the work feel unsustainable.
Schools are no different. Two teachers can have similar teaching loads but experience them very differently depending on the culture around them.
In one school, a difficult class may be met with practical support, shared strategies and leadership follow-up. In another, the same challenge may be treated as an individual failure.
Over time, this difference matters.
This aligns with research on teacher attrition and retention in Australia. Buchanan’s study of former teachers found that teachers’ decisions not to return to the classroom were shaped by more than workload alone, including experiences of professional support, school culture and the extent to which teaching remained personally and professionally sustainable.⁵
Mason and Poyatos Matas similarly argue that teacher attrition needs to be understood through a broader theoretical framework rather than being reduced to isolated individual factors.⁶
A culture that supports retention is not simply “friendly”. It is professionally safe. It allows teachers to ask for help without feeling incompetent. It gives early career teachers room to develop. It recognises the expertise of experienced teachers. It creates structures for collaboration rather than leaving support to chance.
If schools want to retain teachers, culture cannot be treated as a wellbeing add-on. It must be understood as part of workforce infrastructure.
Mentoring must move beyond survival support
Mentoring is often associated with beginning teachers, and rightly so. Research has consistently shown that induction and mentoring can support early-career teachers’ development and retention.
Ingersoll and Strong’s review of induction and mentoring programs found that well-designed support can improve teacher commitment, classroom practice and retention.⁷
However, mentoring is sometimes implemented too narrowly. It becomes a survival mechanism rather than a professional formation process.
In pharmacy, internship is not just about getting through the first year. It is about becoming a pharmacist. Interns learn technical knowledge, but they also learn professional judgement, communication, ethical decision-making and how to see themselves as members of a profession.
Teaching needs the same depth of professional formation. A beginning teacher does not only need help with lesson planning or behaviour management.
They need help interpreting the emotional, ethical and relational complexity of teaching. They need to understand that struggling with a class does not mean they are unsuited to the profession. They need mentors who can normalise challenge while still helping them improve.
This matters because early professional experiences shape identity. If a beginning teacher’s first years are defined by isolation, self-doubt and performative compliance, they may survive, but they may not develop a strong attachment to the profession.
If those same years are supported by meaningful mentoring, feedback and collegial belonging, they are more likely to develop the confidence and identity needed for longterm retention.
Mentoring should therefore be viewed not only as support, but as a retention strategy.
Professional identity is central to retention
Many teachers enter the profession with a strong sense of purpose. They want to make a difference. They want to help young people learn, grow and feel known. Yet the daily reality of teaching can sometimes push teachers away from this original sense of purpose.
Administrative work, compliance demands, behaviour issues, assessment pressures and constant pace can gradually narrow the teacher’s role.
Teachers may begin to feel less like educators and more like managers of tasks, data and risk.
When this happens, professional identity becomes strained. Kelchtermans argues that teacher identity is deeply connected to self-understanding, vulnerability and reflection.⁸
In other words, teaching is not merely a set of technical tasks. It is bound up with who teachers understand themselves to be and how they make meaning of their work.
Day and Gu also emphasise that teachers’ professional lives change across career stages, with motivation, commitment and resilience shaped by personal, relational and organisational conditions.⁹
This is where teacher retention becomes more than a workload issue. Workload matters because excessive workload consumes time and energy. But its deeper effect is that it can disconnect teachers from the meaningful parts of their work.
Healthcare has a similar problem. Many health professionals enter their fields because they want to care for people. When the system prevents them from doing that work well, they experience not only tiredness but moral distress. They feel that the work they are doing no longer matches the professional they hoped to become.
Teachers can experience a similar form of professional dissonance. They may still care deeply about students but feel increasingly unable to teach in the way they believe is meaningful.
Over time, this weakens professional identity and makes leaving more likely. Skaalvik and Skaalvik’s work on teacher motivation and burnout supports this idea, showing that professional identity, motivation and work engagement are closely connected to teachers’ wellbeing and commitment.¹⁰
A serious retention strategy must therefore ask: how do schools help teachers stay connected to the purpose, expertise and identity of teaching?
Career changers are an underused part of the retention conversation
Career changers are often discussed as a solution to teacher shortages. This is understandable, but incomplete.
Career changers should not only be viewed as extra supply. They can also help us understand what makes teaching attractive, sustainable or unsustainable.
Those who enter teaching from another profession bring a comparative lens. They know what it feels like to belong to another workforce.
They can identify what schools do well and what other sectors may do better. They can also offer insight into professional identity because they have already experienced one major identity transition.
For career changers, retention is not simply about staying in a job. It is about whether teaching becomes a credible second professional identity.
If schools want to retain career changers, they need to recognise the expertise these individuals bring while also supporting them to become teachers in a deep and authentic sense.
This means avoiding deficit assumptions.
A former pharmacist, engineer, lawyer, nurse or business professional entering teaching is not a blank slate. They bring disciplinary knowledge, workplace maturity and professional experience.
However, they still need support to translate that experience into classroom practice and school culture. If supported well, career changers can strengthen the profession.
If unsupported, they may become another group who enters teaching with enthusiasm but leaves before fully establishing themselves.
Workforce sustainability requires a longer view
The phrase “teacher shortage” can unintentionally narrow our thinking.
It encourages systems to focus on vacancies, recruitment campaigns and immediate supply. These are necessary, but they are not enough.
A workforce sustainability approach asks different questions. How do we keep experienced teachers engaged? How do we support early-career teachers before they become disillusioned? How do we create meaningful career pathways that do not require excellent teachers to leave the classroom to progress? How do we build school cultures where asking for support is normal? How do we help teachers maintain a strong sense of professional identity across a long career?
These questions are harder than recruitment questions, but they are more important.
The National Teacher Workforce Action Plan recognises that teacher supply must be addressed through attraction, retention and support across the career lifecycle.¹¹
This broader framing is important. A sustainable teacher workforce cannot be built by recruitment alone. It also requires attention to the conditions that help teachers remain committed, capable and hopeful about their future in the profession.
Healthcare has learned, often through crisis, that workforce sustainability cannot rely only on attracting more people into the pipeline. It must also address the conditions that cause people to reduce hours, disengage, move sectors or leave. Education faces the same challenge.
Teacher retention will not be solved by one policy, one mentoring program or one wellbeing initiative. It requires a more coherent understanding of teachers as professionals whose commitment is shaped by culture, identity, leadership, career structure and working conditions.
If there is one lesson education can take from healthcare, it is this: people stay in professions when they can imagine a future in them.
The task for schools and systems is not simply to stop teachers leaving. It is to build workplaces where teachers can continue becoming the professionals they hoped to be.
References
1. Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. (2023). Australian Teacher Workforce Data reveals changing landscape and opportunities for positive change. AITSL.
2. Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. (2025). ATWD National Trends: Teacher Workforce, June 2025 edition. AITSL.
3. Department of Education Victoria. (2025). Victorian Teacher Workforce Snapshot 2024. Victorian Government.
4. UNESCO. (2025). Global report on teachers: What you need to know. UNESCO.
5. Buchanan, J. (2012). Telling tales out of school: Exploring why former teachers are not returning to the classroom. Australian Journal of Education, 56(2), 205– 217.
6. Mason, S., & Poyatos Matas, C. (2015). Teacher attrition and retention research in Australia: Towards a new theoretical framework. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 40(11), 45–66.
7. Ingersoll, R. M., & Strong, M. (2011). The impact of induction and mentoring programs for beginning teachers: A critical review of the research. Review of Educational Research, 81(2), 201–233.
8. Kelchtermans, G. (2009). Who I am in how I teach is the message: Selfunderstanding, vulnerability and reflection. Teachers and Teaching, 15(2), 257– 272.
9. Day, C., & Gu, Q. (2010). The New Lives of Teachers. Routledge.
10. Skaalvik, E. M., & Skaalvik, S. (2017). Motivation and burnout in teachers: The role of professional identity and work engagement. Teaching and Teacher Education, 67, 152–160.
11. Department of Education. (2022). National Teacher Workforce Action Plan. Australian Government.
