Why good teachers leave, and what actually keeps them

It is rarely the teaching, and rarely only the pay. It is the volume of work that isn't teaching - and most of that is fixable.

When a good teacher hands in their notice, the exit conversation almost never blames the teaching. It blames everything around it: the marking that follows them home, the reports that restate what is already recorded elsewhere, the emails, the chasing, and the sense that the actual job has become the smallest part of the week.

Pay matters, and no amount of process improvement makes up for a salary that does not cover rent. But pay is usually the reason given rather than the reason felt, because it is the easiest one to say out loud. The reason felt is more often that the week has filled with work nobody would defend as valuable if you asked them to.

It helps to name that work specifically instead of calling it admin. In most schools it is four things: marking that has to happen at home because there is no time in the day, data entered more than once into systems that do not talk to each other, reports written from scratch that repeat existing records, and chasing - for homework, for absence notes, for forms.

The duplication is worth attacking first, because it is pure loss. A teacher who records a behaviour incident in a book, again in a system, and a third time in an email to a head of year has done the same work three times and produced no more information than the first time. Nobody defends this when it is pointed out; it survives because no single person owns all three steps.

The instinct when staff are overloaded is to add something - a tool, a wellbeing initiative, a training day on time management. That usually makes it worse, because every new thing carries a learning cost paid by the people who are already out of time. The better question is which task you can delete.

The most useful version of that question is to ask staff directly: if you could remove one thing from your week, what would it be? The answers tend to be unanimous and unglamorous, and they are almost never what leadership assumed. Then remove that one thing, and be seen to remove it.

Retention is cheaper than recruitment by a wide margin, and a department that keeps its people gets better every year in a way hiring never replaces. The teachers who stay are the ones who feel their time is treated as valuable - which is a decision a school makes weekly, not a policy it writes once.