Survey Methods to Identify Risk of Attrition: Measures of Career Intention and Regret

Mark Carver

doi:10.3390/educsci11100617

Abstract

The common measure of teacher retention as snapshots of those employed in state-funded schools may overestimate attrition by failing to consider a desire for flexibility in contemporary teaching careers. When used as a measure of the effectiveness of teacher education, an over-emphasis on classroom teacher supply may also narrow the curriculum to teacher training rather than the more expansive ‘learning teaching’. This paper discusses two ‘softer’ measures of retention, career intention and training regret, to give a more general sense of how contemporary teachers see their career development as relating to their initial teacher education and professional learning. These measures are generated by adapting survey questions from the OECD’s TALIS and the US’ Beginning Teacher Longitudinal Study, simply asking teachers where they see themselves in five years’ time and if they would still choose to become a teacher if they could go back to before they began training. Surveys were administered annually to two cohorts of recent graduates as part of the Measuring Quality in Initial Teacher Education project—three data captures for 2018 graduates, two for 2019 graduates. It is shown how these measures help to mitigate declines in survey response and can give some helpful estimates of teacher attrition with respect to sex, ethnicity, school type, and degree type. The alternative measures are also argued to give helpful indicators of attrition risk before it happens, allowing discussion of how teachers’ career intentions change during their early careers. In particular, it is found that leaving the classroom is a fairly common expectation, but not necessarily because of teacher burnout. It is suggested that asking what teachers can imagine themselves doing is an effective measure for engaging with issues around vocational choice and teaching as a lifelong profession, with implications for how careers in education are conceptualised in initial teacher education programmes.

Highlights

The supply of enough high-quality teachers is regarded as a perennial issue “in all industrialised countries” [1] (p. 202), with regular shortages of teachers in particular subject areas, with certain skills, in rural areas, or because of a need to maintain target class sizes as birth rates fluctuate [2]
The Measuring Quality in Initial Teacher Education (MQuITE) study began with a snapshot survey of 2018 graduates (n = 332) as they completed their ITE programmes, but later expanded to include 2019 graduates and a small group of 2020 graduates when two new universities were accredited for initial teacher education
While not a direct measure of teacher retention—it is a measure that gives no indication of a teacher’s employment status—presentations of the emerging data at conferences and government committees have found that one measure resonates well: “If you could go back to the start of university and start over again, would you become a teacher or not?” OECD’s TALIS phrases this as “If I could decide again, I would still choose to work as a teacher” under the prompt “We would like to know how you generally feel about your job

Summary

Introduction

The supply of enough high-quality teachers is regarded as a perennial issue “in all industrialised countries” [1] (p. 202), with regular shortages of teachers in particular subject areas, with certain skills, in rural areas, or because of a need to maintain target class sizes as birth rates fluctuate [2]. One of the most common uses of retention figures is to help policymakers estimate the numbers and types of available teachers to determine the allocation of training places, incentives for new or serving teachers, and related policies around class size or teacher workload. Some of these measures can be used to judge the quality of initial teacher education (ITE), with notions such as early career teacher resiliency being used to compare different ITE providers or routes. This is most apparent in the ‘wastage rate’ measure, which counts any teacher not in the national state-funded school sector (except for short-term or maternity leave) as ‘wasted’, a term imbued with covert meaning and intent

Methods

Results

Conclusion