"We're expected to do the impossible": Why are so many teachers quitting?

A lack of funding and rising workload are leaving teachers and students disillusioned - but figures show the tide could be turning.

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Jul 12, 2025

Last year, more than six in every 1,000 teaching posts were empty. Pic: *BBC LDRS*

After growing up with a teacher for a dad, Caroline swore she would never go into teaching. But that changed when she moved to Canada and began volunteering with impoverished and homeless children.

“I couldn't understand how you could end up being illiterate having spent your life in the school system,” Caroline, now 60, tells The Lead. So, in 1999, she moved back to England and began teaching full-time in Herefordshire.

For Caroline and many like her, her decision to teach stemmed from a “passion for sharing knowledge and developing young people to reach their potential.” But 25 years later, Caroline says she’d be happy if she never had to set foot in a school again — if only she didn’t have a mortgage to pay.

In 2017, Caroline left her permanent teaching role to become a supply teacher. She isn’t the only one stepping away from full-time teaching.

“We have a teacher recruitment and retention crisis,” Darren Northcott, a national official for the Teachers’ Union [NASWUT], tells The Lead.

In March, figures showed teaching vacancies were at a record high. A report by the National Foundation for Education Research [NFER] found that last year, more than six in every 1,000 teaching posts were empty. That’s around 2,800 total vacancies, double the vacancy rate recorded in 2020 and six times higher than in 2010. Meanwhile, recent government statistics show the number of full-time teachers fell for the first time since 2018.

Although the crisis appears to have deepened since the pandemic, Northcott says it is a “long-standing, long-term issue” with more and more teachers leaving before retirement since 2012.

These vacancies are felt all over the sector, both in primary and secondary schools, and across every single subject. “It’s a really deep problem,” adds Northcott. “It's difficult to build up a kind of core body of staff in a school year on year, or the kind of environment the children need.”

Schools and pupils are being left without a consistent body of teachers, and performance is suffering. Despite an improvement in 2021, GCSE grades have steadily fallen for the past three years, with last year’s results only marginally higher than pre-pandemic levels, and more children failing English and Maths. In primary schools, only 61 per cent of children are meeting the expected standard in reading, writing and maths. Only 8 per cent are excelling.

Teaching exodus

According to the latest government figures for 2024, some 42,200 teachers left state-funded teaching for reasons other than retirement. Although slightly more new teachers joined the workforce, data shows many early career teachers (around one in 10) leave in their first few years on the job.

As Northcott notes, the causes for such an exodus are complex and interwoven. But for most, it's the combination of workload, low pay and poor pupil behaviour that is driving resignations. “In real terms, teachers’ pay has fallen by about 25 per cent since 2010,” he says.

Meanwhile, the most recent version of the government’s Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders report, published in November last year, found almost half (49 per cent) of teachers felt their workload was not acceptable. On average, teachers work around 51 hours per week, while being paid between £31,650 to £49,084 (or slightly more in London). Almost a quarter (23 per cent) report working more than 60 hours per week.

While the government has accepted the 4 per cent pay award recommended by the School Teachers' Review Body [STRB], schools are expected to find the first 1 per cent in their existing budget. Funding cuts like these are forcing school leaders to reduce teachers and teaching assistants across both primary and secondary schools, while the number of children in non-specialist state schools with special educational needs [SEN], who need one-to-one support, is increasing.

One of the fastest-growing contributors to teacher workload is pupil behaviour, which teachers report has worsened since the pandemic. For Caroline, this is one of the biggest reasons for leaving.

In her experience, students have become ruder, more racist, sexist and generally more unkind. “There have always been behaviour problems,” she says, “but now they just feel different.” She feels that students and parents alike are “more likely to question your judgement [as a teacher]” and says that homeschooling and the rise of social media during the pandemic likely caused the shift. Caroline isn’t alone: in a survey by BBC News in April, a third of secondary school teachers reported pupil misogyny, and data shows that suspensions for racist abuse are on the rise.

According to the Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders report, 60 per cent of teachers report spending too much time following up on behaviour incidents – an increase of 10 per cent since 2022. For Caroline, this is absolutely the case: “When you've just taught a class that misbehaved, you have to log all that behaviour, follow all of that up, calling parents,” she says. This often feels like “reliving and reprocessing the negativity,” she adds. “It's draining you all day, and then you go home and you're exhausted.”

A self-fulfilling crisis

When cover teachers experience poor student behaviour, they may refuse to come back. Then the school will be forced to find another teacher, and, Caroline says, students may behave even worse. “It snowballs,” she says. “And then that impacts the regular teachers as well, because they're having to log behaviour as well as set the lessons for those classes, which means they've got extra workload on top of their already high workload.” The upshot is that students are often left without regular teachers and, in secondary schools, may not be taught by specialist teachers.

Nadeine, a 30-year-old secondary school English teacher based in East London – who asked to be identified only by her first name – has had to teach a range of subjects she has no expertise in. “If you're a teacher of any humanities subject, you might be asked to take on an extra subject just because they can't find a teacher, or they can't afford to hire a teacher,” she tells The Lead.

Not only is this nerve-wracking for teachers, who need to answer questions on a subject they don’t fully understand, it also increases workload. “I was having to research random things like volcanoes and earthquakes in my own time just to be able to teach it,” says Nadeiene, who had to teach geography. “When you've been teaching your own subject for a while, you obviously know it inside-out, but taking on something else isn't as easy as just showing a presentation, and it does create stress and pressure.”

“Even if you're a well-intentioned, highly motivated student, and you're getting cover lessons, or it's a non-specialist teacher, and it's obvious they're just delivering a bog standard lesson, you start becoming disillusioned because you're not being taught anything,” says Caroline.

This leads to a feedback loop, where student behaviour worsens as more teachers leave.

On top of this, schools are losing experienced teachers. Government figures show the retention rate for teachers with over a decade of experience is at 59 per cent, compared with 65 per cent in 2012. The problem is worse in deprived areas: a recent report by the Public Accounts Committee [PAC] highlighted the fact that around a third of teachers in the most disadvantaged schools had less than five years of experience, compared to 20 per cent in the least disadvantaged schools.

A narrowing curriculum

Caroline also blames the teaching-to-the-test culture for teacher disillusionment. The National Education Union’s [NEU] State of Education survey, published in April, found that teachers feel stressed at work the majority of the time. This, says NEU General Secretary Daniel Kebede, can in part be put down to the metric-driven culture imposed by Ofsted.

“As the Gilbert Review highlighted,” there is ‘a climate of fear and frustration around inspection’ and ‘weakening trust in Ofsted,’” he said.

According to the campaign group More Than A Score, almost half of year 6 teachers (46 per cent) and 41 per cent of heads say they feel under pressure to deliver results. In some cases, the stress can be life-altering. In 2023, headteacher Ruth Perry tragically took her own life after Ofsted rated her school inadequate. She reportedly felt powerless and had begun to dread going to work.

“We're almost expected to do the impossible,” says Nadeine. “There are so many external factors, like poverty, and it’s impossible as an individual classroom teacher to mitigate against all of that, but we're expected to get outstanding results from kids who have so much going on in their own personal lives.” For Nadeine, it’s these extenuating factors that drive poor behaviour.

“The government expects us to try and cure all of that in our classrooms,” she continues. “So that feels like so much pressure, because, especially as a secondary school teacher you have the futures of 100 or more kids directly on your shoulders.”

For Caroline, the strict, metrics-based approach to teaching is also driving teachers out of the profession. “In the 25 years I've been teaching, I've seen the curriculum killed in so many ways of its creativity,” she says. “Teaching was something people chose to do out of a passion for sharing knowledge and developing young people to reach their potential, and that's just not what we're doing anymore.”

The motherhood penalty

A lack of flexible working policies means teachers, around 75 per cent of whom are women, are forced to leave if they decide to have children. Women in their 30s are the biggest single group leaving teaching, with more than 9,000 of them quitting in 2022-23, compared with just over 3,400 men of a similar age.

Although flexible working is on the rise in teaching, it’s still rare, and the Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders report found that 61 per cent of teachers believe flexible working arrangements would hinder career progression.

“Teachers find it very difficult to access flexible working arrangements, such as moving from a full-time to a part-time contract,” says Northcott. “So if you're a teacher who's got family or caring commitments, and you need to amend how you work to meet those commitments, it can be very hard to get employers to agree to do that. So many teachers feel they've got no other choice but to leave.”

Nadeine was forced to leave one school during her first pregnancy. “My experience was horrific,” she says. “There was no support, no flexibility; if anything, there was suspicion about every time I had to have a midwife appointment. It was very hostile, even before I had the baby.”

When she returned from maternity leave, her school declined her request to go part-time. “I ended up having a lot of time off sick because my son was sick a lot, too, and I was put on disciplinary.”

This lack of flexibility may also be contributing to fewer new teachers entering the profession (although figures suggest the tide may be changing here). Graduates, says Northcott, are prioritising careers that offer hybrid and remote working. “That is always going to be very difficult, and no one denies that, but it's another reason why teaching perhaps looks less attractive compared to some other occupations,” he says.

No clear plan

During the election campaign, Labour pledged to recruit an additional 6,500 new teachers over the course of its five-year parliamentary term. But the Public Accounts Committee report said the Government “lacks a coherent plan,” and recommended looking at changes to contractual and working conditions and pay.

What is clear is that this issue is to be solved, it needs to be fixed at the root. First, says Northcott, schools need to reduce bureaucratic exercises that have no bearing on the progress of pupils. According to the Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders report, teachers spend less than half of their working hours teaching. “Things like making lengthy lesson plans and having strict guidelines on how to mark work, clerical tasks – all of this adds up,” he says.

The other big thing is improving student behaviour; a complex issue with complex solutions. For Northcott, early intervention is key.

“A lot of the children in secondary school, who have behavioural challenges, often have problems within their families, or have faced challenges when they were very young,” he says. “Are those families getting the support that they need to make sure that their children are having the best start? A lot of the investment in all of that has been reduced over the past 15 years, and we need to make sure that that's back in place.” He also says better access to school-based counselling would help those struggling with their mental health.

Finally, schools need more funding to be able to offer the best quality of education. As Northcott says: “If we don’t have enough teachers, or the time, space and resources to teach children, we aren’t providing the highest possible level of education that we can.”■