Who withdraws from initial teacher preparation programmes and why?

Abstract

Background: In recent years, withdrawal from initial teacher preparation (ITP) programmes, in England and elsewhere, has become a cause for concern amongst both ITP providers and policy-makers.

Purpose: This paper seeks to enhance the presently underdeveloped evidence base on the causes of withdrawal from ITP and on the characteristics of student teachers who are most likely to withdraw.

Sample: All ITP providers in England were stratified by ITP route (including university-administered undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, school-centred and employment-based programmes) and a random sample within each route was selected. Of the 110 providers invited to participate in the research, 74 agreed to take part. All student teachers following the specified ITP routes in these institutions were then invited to participate in a longitudinal survey about their experiences of ITP and early professional development.

Design and methods: Student teachers (n = 4790) completed an initial questionnaire about their reasons for undertaking ITP and their preconceptions about ITP and teaching. Of these, 3162 took part in a follow-up telephone interview about their experiences of ITP and, for 135 of these participants, about their experiences of withdrawing from ITP. Descriptive and inferential statistics were employed: (a) to explore the experiences of those who withdrew from ITP; (b) to examine the extent to which withdrawal might be predicted by their reasons for undertaking ITP or their preconceptions of ITP and teaching; (c) to compare the responses to a number of key questions of those who withdrew from ITP and those who did not.

Results: The findings show that withdrawal from ITP is differentiated by a number of variables including the ITP route being followed, whether student teachers are seeking to teach in primary or secondary schools, their age, gender and prior commitment to the profession. Data suggest that the main causes of withdrawal relate to workload and an apparent lack of support from ITP providers.

Conclusions: The findings support some those of earlier studies but contradict others, for example by showing that those who report more prior experience of working in schools are not less likely to withdraw from ITP. A number of implications are presented for teacher educators and policy-makers.

Keywords:

• withdrawal
• student teachers
• initial teacher preparation

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the DCSF, TDA and the General Teaching Council for England (GTC) for funding the (Becoming a Teacher) research from which this article was developed, and to all members of the research team (at the University of Nottingham, the University of Leeds and Ipsos MORI) and the project Steering Group for their invaluable contributions to the study. We would also like to thank Ian Menter for his insightful comments on a draft version of this article; and the reviewers and editors of Educational Research for their very helpful comments on and suggested revisions to the manuscript.

Notes

1. We use the term initial teacher preparation (ITP) to refer to what is variously described as initial teacher training (ITT), initial teacher education (ITE) and pre-service training (Hobson et al. 2008).

2. Further information about ‘Golden Hellos’, tuition fees, student loans and bursaries for those following ITP programmes in England is provided in the Appendix.

3. At the time of writing (in 2009), ‘shortage subjects’ include mathematics, science, modern foreign languages, English, drama, design and technology, information and communications technology, music and religious education.

4. The exact date varied from one ITP provider to another, depending upon how soon they were able to facilitate the research team's access to prospective research participants/trainees.

5. It was not possible to establish with any degree of confidence the numbers of student teachers enrolled on the sampled routes in the (74) sampled providers, because of disparities between the number of allocated places and the number of trainees on course at the time of the survey.

6. Response categories were grouped as follows: (0) Yes, have completed or will complete shortly (by December 2004) and (1) No, have left before completion or will leave shortly. Those who reported that they had delayed/deferred the completion of their course were excluded from this analysis. The key focus of the analysis was to identify the factors that differentiated those completing their courses from those withdrawing in a conclusive way.

7. Trainees' prior commitment to the profession was measured by whether or not they stated in Wave 1 of the survey that they expected to be in teaching in five years' time.

8. Trainees who had prior experience of working in schools were those who reported in ‘Wave 1’ of the survey that they had experience of paid or voluntary work with children and/or young people: as a lunchtime supervisor in a school; a nursery nurse/assistant; or as a school/further education (FE) demonstrator/teaching assistant/learning support assistant.

9. Flexible PGCE trainees were considered to be more comparable with those on one-year programmes, and were thus included in these analyses, on the grounds that 55% of trainees in our sample who were following this route indicated that they completed or expected to complete their ITP in one year or less and 85% indicated that they completed or expected to complete within 18 months of starting their programmes.

10. In binary logistic regression, the b coefficient is an estimate of the predicted change in the log odds of the outcome variable (i.e. the natural log of the odds of the outcome occurring or not, which, in the present model, can be interpreted as ‘the log of the odds of a trainee withdrawing or not from his/her ITP course’) that is associated with a unit change in the value of the respective explanatory variable. Given the complexity involved in interpreting the b coefficients, their exponents (or odds ratios) are used, instead, to describe statistical differences between subgroups of respondents (see footnote 9 below).

11. Beta weights are the standardised values of the b coefficients. Unlike the b coefficients, which are affected by the standard deviations of each explanatory variable, beta weights are directly comparable and help to identify the relative importance (effect size) of each explanatory variable on the outcome variable. The effect size could be interpreted as the magnitude of the change in the likelihood of an outcome occurring (in the present model, the likelihood of a trainee withdrawing from his/her ITP course) that is associated with a unit change in an explanatory variable (e.g. following the GRTP route rather than the university-administered PGCE route, which, in statistical terms, means changing the value of the respective ‘route’ variable from 0 to 1). The higher the absolute value of the beta weight, the higher the effect size of the respective explanatory variable on the outcome.

12. The exp(b) (or odds ratio) indicates how many times more likely respondents in a particular group (e.g. male trainees) are to give an answer of 1 on the outcome variable (in the present model, an answer of 1 indicates withdrawal from the ITP course) compared with another group of respondents defined as the ‘reference group’ (female trainees).

13. As already explained, comparing the absolute values in the ‘beta weights’ column of Table 1 provides a direct comparison of the relative importance (measured by the effect size) of each variable in the model.

14. It should be noted that, here and in subsequent sections, analyses include those following undergraduate routes who withdrew from ITP in their final year only (as well as those who withdrew from one-year ITP programmes), but are unable to shed any light on the motives of those who withdrew from such programmes earlier in their ITP.

15. Analyses of case study data generated for the Becoming a Teacher project suggest: (1) that student and beginning teachers associate support (or the lack of it) primarily with people, most notably mentors and other teachers in their placement schools, ITP tutors and peers (fellow trainees); and (2) that the support needs of student and beginning teachers include having people (mentors and others) who are ‘there for them’ (accessible, willing and able to provide help when it is needed), who treat them as a ‘whole person’, who have regard for their emotional and practical as well as professional needs, who make them feel welcome and ‘safe’ in school, who provide encouragement, reassurance and ‘positive strokes’, who provide ideas relating to their teaching, and who help them deal with specific problems, such as those relating to pupil behaviour (Hobson et al. 2009a).

16. While no respondents explicitly stated that their decision to withdraw from ITP was related to whether or not they were living at or away from home, it is possible that this may have been a contributory factor, for some, to one or more of the reasons given. We were unable to explore this issue further because of a lack of information on this question, and it is an issue which might be explored in future research.

17. In 2002–2003, the (then) Teacher Training Agency in England spent £187m on funding ITP courses and an additional £127.6m on student teacher bursaries (Teacher Training Agency, Annual Report 2002–03, July 2003, HC 994).