Understanding Teaching Retention: Using a discrete choice experiment to measure teacher retention in England

Abstract

Workload: total working hours as a teacher per week (including contact and non-contact hours).Development opportunities: total number of days of continuing professional development (CPD) per year, distributed between two different types of CPD: general CPD offered to all teachers in school; personalised CPD tailored to individual teachers' own development needs.Part-time work: feasibility of moving to a part-time work arrangement.School culture: how much support teachers receive from school leadership and other teaching colleagues.v School characteristics: pupil behaviour in classes.To our knowledge, the research reported here represents the first use of a discrete choice experiment (DCE) approach to understand teachers' retention and their preferences for different employment characteristics.We have taken care to use a rigorous approach, building up to and designing the DCE on the basis of detailed background research, discussion and consultation with experts in the subject area, thorough discussions with the OME steering group -which included members of the School Teachers' Review Body (STRB) secretariat -and piloting. The DCE was embedded in a survey that also collected teachers' current employment and socio-economic characteristics. The background questions allowed us to understand how preferences vary according to different characteristics of the school, and the individual teacher, and also provided some reference information that gave further insight to the choices made in the DCE.From the data collected from the choice experiments, discrete choice models were developed to quantify the importance of pay, rewards and employment characteristics in teachers' retention choices, thus providing estimates of the relative importance of those factors in shaping retention choices. The model was based on 22,100 choice observations, collected from 2,210 teachers. The relative values (compared to the influence of changes in annual pay) illustrate the relative impact of different factors on the retention of teachers and their broader employment preferences. Our model showed that the choices made by teachers are influenced by a variety of work-related factors, as well as variables related to an individual's current employment and socio-economic characteristics. Previous evidence has repeatedly found that a wide range of factors have influenced teacher retention, such as pay, workload and flexibility of working arrangement, etc. Our findings are consistent with this but go deeper, by providing insight into how these factors interact with each other in teachers' retention choices, quantifying their relative impact and revealing how these preferences differ between different groups of teachers.Below we highlight key aspects of the methodology and discuss the key findings from the study.The quality of the quantitative survey results is believed to be highWe believe the quality of the results to be high, because of the robustness of the survey sample and the level of engagement of respondents in the stated preference discret...