HOW IS LIFE AS A RECENTLY QUALIFIED TEACHER? NEW EVIDENCE FROM A LONGITUDINAL COHORT STUDY IN ENGLAND

ABSTRACT

England is currently facing a crisis in the recruitment and retention of teachers, with one-in-three newly qualified staff leaving the profession within five years of completing their training. This paper investigates several different aspects of the lives of recently qualified teachers in England, including their life satisfaction, mental health, working hours and their social lives. Recently qualified teachers are found to have higher-levels of life-satisfaction than their peers working in other professional/graduate jobs, despite working longer hours for little extra pay. They are also less likely to believe that Britain is a place where hard work gets rewarded. Yet there is no evidence that recently qualified teachers have worse mental health outcomes, or have a less active social life, than young people working in other jobs.

Keywords:

• next steps
• newly qualified teachers
• occupation
• mental health
• teachers

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Correction

6. Acknowledgements

The Nuffield Foundation is an independent charitable trust with a mission to advance social well-being. It funds research that informs social policy, primarily in Education, Welfare, and Justice. It also funds student programmes that provide opportunities for young people to develop skills in quantitative and scientific methods. The Nuffield Foundation is the founder and co-funder of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and the Ada Lovelace Institute. The Foundation has funded this project, but the views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily the Foundation. Visit www.nuffieldfoundation.org. We are grateful for their support. Helpful comments have been received on the draft from our project steering group, who we would like to thank for their input and support.

8. Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

9. Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ We have used data from the 2018 round of the Teaching and Learning International Study (TALIS) for England to estimate the proportion of NQTs who are age 26 and below. We find that 61 percent of NQTs in England are 26 or younger.

² This means that 3.7 percent of the Next Steps sample were classified as teachers. We have used Labour Force Survey data from 2014–2018 to investigate how many 24–28 year olds are classified as teachers in the population. In total, around 3 percent of 24–28 year old LFS respondents were assigned a SOC code of 2314, 2315 or 2316, which is broadly similar to the Next Step cohort.

³ This is the same National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NSSEC) group as teachers.

⁴ This includes nurses, midwives, physios, occupational therapists, social workers, medical practitioners and paramedics.

⁵ This includes accountants, management consultants, project managers, architects, town planners, surveyors, public relations, statisticians, human resource officer/manager and IT workers.

⁶ At age 17, separate questions were asked about pubs/bars and parties/discos/nightclubs. We combine these in our analysis when comparing to age 26 responses.

⁷ For continuous variables we have standardised the outcome by subtracting the Next Steps cohort mean and dividing by the Next Steps cohort standard deviation. For ordered categorical variables, we have followed Chinn (2000) and converted the estimated log-odds into an approximate effect size by dividing the coefficients by 1.81.

⁸ This includes the extent they felt the following characteristics were important for their future job: promotion opportunities, pay, it allows them to help others, is not routine, to have regular hours and whether its important to have a job/career, whether its important for them to raise a family in the future.

⁹ This includes whether the extent the cohort member believes that (a) it is important to keep a job even if they don’t like it; (b) whether they would leave a future job if they didn’t like it; (c) whether they feel having any job is better than being unemployed and (d) their attitude to whether women with young children should work.

¹⁰ This includes the extent they felt the following characteristics were important for their future job: promotion opportunities, pay, it allows them to help others, is not routine, to have regular hours and whether its important to have a job/career, whether its important for them to raise a family in the future.

¹¹ This includes whether the extent the cohort member believes that (a) it is important to keep a job even if they don’t like it; (b) whether they would leave a future job if they didn’t like it; (c) whether they feel having any job is better than being unemployed and (d) their attitude to whether women with young children should work.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Nuffield Foundation [EDO/43626].