International perspectives on early career teacher retention

The Department for Education (DfE) has calculated that 22 per cent of teachers in England leave the profession within their first two years of teaching, with the number rising to 33 per cent by year five (Foster, 2019). In 2019, I carried out some research into foreign education systems to find out whether they could hold any secrets for how to improve these worrying retention rates; interviews were conducted with teachers, school leaders and government officials across Singapore, Norway and Switzerland. These conversations revealed a number of factors that contribute to such low attrition rates in these countries (between two and eight per cent), but could we use any of these strategies to retain new teachers in England? Workload You would be forgiven for thinking that the only way to improve attrition rates is by reducing the workload of new staff. After all, the majority of teachers leaving the profession in England cite extraneous workload as the most significant reason for their