'Such are the Ambitions of Youth': Exploring issues of retention and attrition of early career teachers in New South Wales

Teacher Attrition and Retention Research in Australia: Towards a New Theoretical Framework

“…The main limitation of 1995-1999 2000-2004 2005-2009 2010-2014 this approach to sampling is the inability to project the findings to wider populations, firstly due to the small number of most of the study samples, and also because of the different lengths of time over which teachers were followed. Some studies observed teachers at the beginning of their careers in longitudinal studies for three years (Frid, Smith, Sparrow, & Trinidad, 2008;Harrington & Brasche, 2013), four years (Buchanan, Prescott, Schuck, Aubusson, Burke, & Louviere, 2013) and up to five years (Manuel, 2003) into their careers. Two more studies looked at attrition rates of teachers by seeking out the destinations of specific cohorts of graduates at a future post-graduation point in time.…”

“…Support is a broad term in the literature. It is a term that is rarely defined and which is perhaps not even clear in the minds of teachers themselves, who often talk about a lack of support (Handal, Watson, Petocz, & Maher, 2013;Manuel, 2003;Mason, 2010;Rice, 2014). A common strategy for building support for beginning teachers is the implementation of formal mentoring and induction programmes.…”

“…Mason, on the other hand, found a number of language teachers left because their pre-service training had left them feeling "underprepared for the realities of being a language specialist" (p. 17), as well as not having sufficient language proficiency, which in language education is both the content knowledge and the method of instruction. Other researchers argued that teacher's professional knowledge and skills needed to be further developed in areas such as educational and school politics (Ewing & Smith, 2003), pedagogical knowledge, classroom and behaviour management, (Manuel, 2003), and cultural awareness (Hall, 2012;Harrington, 2013) in order to facilitate retention. Pre-service training that presents teaching in an overly idealized and unrealistic way was also criticized (Ewing & Smith, 2003;Frid, Smith, Sparrow, & Trinidad, 2008).…”

“…One issue that has been revealed is the time frame over which early career teachers were studied. This ranged from twelve months (Paris, 2013); fifteen months (Ewing & Smith, 2003;Sharplin, O'Neill, & Chapman, 2010), three years (Frid, Smith, Sparrow, & Trinidad, 2008;Harrington & Brasche, 2011;Plunkett & Dyson, 2011), four years (Buchanan et al, 2013) to five years (Manuel, 2003). While financial and time constraints do not always allow for the collection of data over extended periods, the lack of consistency in defining the term 'early career teacher' is an issue that must be addressed, as different time periods will produce different results, results that cannot be compared across studies unless everyone is on the same page.…”

“…While some studies used the broad term 'work conditions' (Ashiedu & Scott-Ladd, 2012;Buchanan, 2009Buchanan, , 2010Buchanan, , 2012Manuel, 2003), others identified specific examples of these conditions such as workload (Buchanan et al, 2013;Laming & Horne, 2013), increased administrative tasks (Handal, Watson, Petocz, & Maher, 2013), and increased levels of accountability (Howes & Goodman-Delahunty, 2014). The conditions of teachers' employment is also of significance, and job insecurity was a widely acknowledged problem (Buchanan, 2009(Buchanan, , 2010(Buchanan, , 2012Frid, Smith, Sparrow, & Trinidad, 2008;Handal, Watson, Petocz, & Maher, 2013;Plunkett & Dyson, 2011).…”