... if you want to read more about my research in this area here's my open access paper in @berj-2025.bsky.social sky.social 🔍 bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

In other words, the issues of teacher recruitment and teacher retention require different approaches to counter them. It makes sense, then, that these issues should not be constantly bundled together but should be considered and tackled separately (5/5)

These would-be teachers didn’t mention the things that current and former teachers have said push them out of teaching: the profession’s high workload, stress and poor wellbeing (4/5)

My research shows that young people who previously aspired to teach did not pursue teaching because the profession no longer held 'status' or 'safety' (3/5)

In this piece I share how my research with aspirant teachers indicates that the reasons teachers leave teaching are not the same as the reasons people choose not to become teachers (2/5)

You can read the full open-access paper here: bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... (11/11)

Importantly, this paper demonstrates that the reasons why young people do not pursue teaching are not the same reasons why people leave the profession

🚫 i.e., we should not always group teacher recruitment and retention together, they are not caused by the same issues (10/11)

This raises questions about how we can raise the status and safety of teaching for all... (9/11)

The framework shows that the reasons why people want to become teachers go beyond their individual desires (e.g., wanting to work with children), and include how potential teachers see themselves, and are seen by others, in relation to teaching (8/11)

In this framework I propose that status and safety are relative to a person's background and/or the social and cultural inequities that they experience.

e.g. teaching is not 'low in status' for everyone, at all times ‼️(7/11)

Using these analyses I propose a new framework of status and safety with which to examine why some people become teachers, whilst others do not:

*teacher-makers and teacher-breakers* (6/11)

Those who chose to pursue teaching by age 22 maintained or returned to teaching as both high in status and safety

Those who dropped their teaching aspirations lost the relative status and/or safety of teaching (5/11)

I found that teaching was seen as a profession which afforded both respect (status) and minimal risk (safety) by all aspirant teachers in this study

But that these perceptions shifted over time - status and status can be lost and gained (4/11)

In the paper I present analyses of qualitative data from interviews tracking aspirant teachers in England over 11 years 👶➡️🧑 (3/11)

This paper is part of a special issue focusing on teacher shortages and ways forward for policy, research and practice in teacher supply

Thanks to Beng Huat See, Gemma Moss, Robert Klassen, Mark Ledger, Sophie Thompson-Lee & Rebecca Snell for the opportunity (2/11)