Retaining quality beginning teachers in the profession

Volume 2 Number 1 May 2003

Robyn Ann Ewing (University of Sydney, Australia)

David Langley Smith (University of Sydney, Australia)

Despite increased success in attracting quality graduates into teacher education and growing support for the induction and mentoring of beginning teachers, it is well established in countries in the Western world that between 25% and 40% of all newly-recruited teachers resign or burnout in their first three to five years of teaching. The recent Review of Teacher Education in New South Wales, Australia, highlighted the alarming upward trend in early career teacher resignation rates in NSW over the past four years (Ramsey, 2000, p. 197). This trend, critical in New South Wales, is representative of attrition trends in other Australian States and territories, as well as is in other parts of the world. Further, there are claims that it is the most able who are most likely to leave. Given the resultant wastage of teacher education resources coupled with the impending shortage of teachers (Baird, 2001, p. 5) it is imperative to explore the reasons for this trend within the broader context of beginning teacher experiences on entry into the profession. This paper reports data from the first phase of a longitudinal research project (1997-2002) designed to understand more fully the forces that shape the work patterns of beginning and early career teachers both within and outside the classroom. The data reported in this paper focuses specifically on the survey, interview and narrative data of University of Sydney graduates. The paper examines features of the pre-service teacher education programme that participants perceived as valuable in preparing them to teach alongside the structures that were in place to support and sustain them as they began their professional journey.

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