Half of Teachers Are Leaving. Nobody Signed the Order.

Schools went back this week, and somewhere on a staffroom noticeboard, next to the timetable and the fire drill notice, sits the headline from the Liberal Democrats' latest survey: almost half of teachers think they will have left the profession within five years. Not eventually, not in some actuarial fog of retirement projections. Within five years. One in two of the people standing in front of a class this September may not be there in 2031.

This ought to read as an emergency. It reads, instead, as an update. Education Support, the charity that has been tracking exactly this problem, published its own figures in October last year: one in eleven qualified teachers left the state sector in a single academic year, 2023–24. Two years before that, the same charity ran a full Commission on Teacher Retention, took evidence, made recommendations. Its follow-up paper describes itself as setting out "our evolving thinking." Translated out of the register of the policy paper and into English: we said this two years ago, we are saying it again, and in the interval the profession has continued to empty.

The Department for Education has not been idle in the sense that matters to a press office. There have been retention payments for early-career teachers in shortage subjects, a workload reduction pledge, a wellbeing charter, bursaries reshuffled and re-announced under successive ministers who each, briefly, held the brief as though it were a hot coal. What there has not been is a reform that changed the number on the noticeboard. The grammar of each announcement is identical: pilot, evaluate, consider rolling out nationally. Nobody in this chain is asked what happens to the teachers who leave during the evaluation phase.

The case for caution is not stupid, and it deserves saying properly rather than waved away. School budgets are genuinely constrained; a national retention policy that ignores the difference between a rural comprehensive in Cumbria and an oversubscribed academy in Tower Hamlets would be crude and probably wasteful. Piloting before scaling is how public money avoids being poured into schemes that look good in a press release and do nothing in a classroom. Nobody sensible wants Whitehall issuing a single national fix by decree.

But the causes here are not mysterious, and they have not been mysterious for a quarter of a century. Richard Ingersoll's organisational research on teacher turnover dates to 2001. The remedies that keep recurring in the literature — smaller classes, proper support staff, career progression that doesn't require leaving the classroom, and giving teachers a voice in the decisions made about their own schools — are not exotic discoveries awaiting a pilot scheme. They are the same four items, restated by every commission for twenty years, while the department in charge of them commissions another commission. This is not evidence-gathering. It is evidence-avoidance with a clipboard.

Which is the point at which the audit trail runs cold, because nobody is actually holding the decision. Pay recommendations come from a review body constrained by a Treasury spending settlement it did not set. Workload sits with school leaders and academy trusts operating under an accountability regime — Ofsted, league tables — that the department itself designed and now disowns whenever it produces the wrong incentives. Wellbeing has been handed almost entirely to charities, who now publish toolkits because the state that employs the teachers will not. Everyone in this chain owns a fragment of the problem and none of the outcome, which is the condition this column keeps finding wherever it looks: a decision too large for any single desk, and therefore made by no desk at all.

Set this against 1945, when a Britain that was formally bankrupt needed teachers immediately for the baby boom and the new school-leaving age, and simply trained them — an emergency scheme that put new teachers into classrooms within a year, not because the money was there but because someone had decided it had to happen and would answer for it if it didn't. Britain today spends more per pupil in real terms than it did then, employs more civil servants to think about education than Attlee's whole domestic apparatus, and produces, in response to a crisis that touches every classroom in the country, a wellbeing toolkit and an evolving-thinking paper.

The teachers considering leaving are not waiting for evolved thinking. They are waiting to see whether anyone with the power to change their working week is also required to notice if they don't.