New lenses to understand beginning teacher workforce concerns: Developing and justifying scale items for measuring beginning teachers’ and school leaders’ perceptions

Abstract

This paper reports on a collaborative project between educational industry and research partners, in Queensland, Australia with the aim of developing instruments to gather new information about beginning teacher workforce issues. The investigation stimulates deeper insight into beginning teachers’ (n = 504) and school leaders’ (n = 306) perceptions of specific factors influencing beginning teacher attrition and retention and beginning teacher workforce stability. The convergent mixed-method study includes demographic data and information derived from Likert scales and open questions and is underpinned by context-conscious understanding development theory. The initial scale validation and justification involves confirmatory factor analysis and reliability analysis. The findings offer a new lens to develop an in-depth, multi-layered understanding of beginning teacher workforce issues to inform future research and policy decisions.