This paper examines the reasons why long‐serving teachers remain in the teaching profession. Interest in teacher retention has grown in recent years, both in the UK and internationally, due to concerns over teacher shortage. However, most research on retention has focused on why teachers leave; this paper aims to fill the gap in our understanding of the positive reasons why long‐serving teachers stay in the profession, and how these reasons change over time. We define ‘long‐serving teachers’ as teachers who have taught for 10 years and more. We draw on a subset of data from an existing, broader study (Menzies et al., ) on why teachers enter and stay in the profession. In this paper, we draw on questionnaire findings from over 900 teachers with 0 to over 30 years’ teaching experience, and interviews with 14 long‐serving teachers, to understand why long‐serving teachers enter and, more importantly for our purposes, stay in teaching. We find that teachers’ motivational patterns are highly complex and influenced by school‐level and policy contexts. Nonetheless, two prominent retention factors are identified: teachers’ perceived professional mastery and altruistic reasons. Perceived professional mastery is particularly important due to its mutually reinforcing analytic relationships with other reasons. We find that teachers’ identification with intrinsic, altruistic and perceived professional mastery reasons become stronger with years of experience, but in some cases, paradoxically, so does their identification with extrinsic reasons. From our evidence, we suggest policy implications for enhancing the retention of long‐serving teachers.

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Teacher turnover is a long-standing and worsening problem for schools in England. Strategies to reduce turnover have been extensively researched; however, in England, fewer studies have engaged with how turnover affects students and staff, or how this impact can be mitigated. This article synthesises research suggesting that the negative impact of high turnover is linked to its corrosive impact on trust, student-centric and institutional knowledge, and collaboration and collegiality. It proposes that schools need to intentionally nurture relationships, establish routines and culture at an institutional level and create opportunities for informal professional development. It also argues that decisions about teacher allocation or assignment can drive within-school churn, undermining continuity of care. Teacher allocation decisions have a particularly negative impact on socio-economically disadvantaged and minority ethnic students, but ‘looping’ may reduce within-school churn and enhance continuity of care. Looping has been studied in several countries, but further research is needed in the English context, particularly given that teachers report being open to the strategy, if it is supported by evidence. However, as this article highlights, there are potential tensions between reducing teachers’ influence over allocation and the impact this might have on teacher satisfaction and retention, as well as potential tradeoffs between grade-specific and student-specific expertise.