Let’s talk about retention
Every school is feeling it – too many teachers leaving, not enough staying. There is always a national drive on recruitment – new bursaries, training routes, golden handshakes. Yet the real crisis is retention, because the stark reality is teachers are leaving faster than we can replace them. Workload is the number one reason they give, so unless we address it – and especially marking – we will watch the profession slowly hollow out.
Let’s look at the facts:
• According to the Teacher Labour Market in England Annual Report 2024, about 44% more teachers said they intended to leave teaching in 2022/23 than in the previous year. NFER
• Five years after qualifying, only around 68% of teachers remain in the profession. That’s nearly a third gone within five years.
• Vacancy rates in England have been rising sharply. Teacher vacancies are more than double their pre Covid levels with six unfilled posts per 1,000 teachers.
More than six teaching posts in every 1,000 were left unfilled last year, according to the National Foundation for Education Research (NFER), double the vacancy rate recorded before the Covid.
• Workload remains the number one reason cited by teachers leaving: long hours, marking, data entry, admin. They are burning out under the weight of what they are asked to do. NFER
These are not ‘nice to know’ stats. They are alarm bells, signalling an existential risk for schools, for standards, and for the country’s future workforce.
When I was in government, we obsessed over recruitment drives. But the truth is this: unless we make the job itself doable, we will continue to lose staff faster than we can hire them. Pay and recruitment matter, of course – but the real lever is workload and assessment is the sharpest edge of it.
If we want teachers to stay, marking has to respect their time and their judgement – not add to their admin. That is why I was so struck when I first spoke to Jeremy Waters, a former teacher who refused to accept the status quo and built something to flip it. Through his company Elastik, he developed Writemark, which is already making a difference in Australia. The UK should be paying attention – not just to one tool, but to the principle behind it: smarter assessment that supports teachers rather than drains them.
Jeremy’s journey from school leader to business founder was fuelled by a line every teacher has uttered at some point: “I love teaching, but I cannot keep this up.” And he has a point. The premium value of a teacher is their face-to-face time to inspire, encourage and support. Yet we still fail to respect that – and respect is the key to the retention crisis. That is why examples like Writemark matter.
Ask any teacher what ‘workload’ really means, and they will talk about hours at the kitchen table with exercise books and spreadsheets. It is not that teachers do not value assessment – they know it is vital. The problem is how clunky and time-consuming it has become.
Smarter assessments can make the difference between a teacher staying or walking away. If the marking process is streamlined, consistent and genuinely useful, it frees up teachers to focus on what drew them into the job in the first place: teaching. And when teachers feel their time is respected, they are more likely to stay.
That has knock-on effects – better retention means more experienced staff in schools, stronger mentoring for new teachers and more continuity for pupils. It also cuts the ballooning cost of supply teachers – schools spent over a whopping £520m on agency supply staff alone in 2023–24, draining budgets that could be invested back into classrooms.
Because smarter assessment also helps teachers catch learning gaps earlier, they can intervene before pupils fall behind. Evidence from the Education Endowment Foundation shows effective feedback can add five months’ progress in a year – proving that smarter assessment raises outcomes as well as morale.
We spend over half a billion pounds a year on supply cover. Imagine what even a fraction of that could do if retention improved and the money was reinvested back into schools. Smarter assessment is not the only answer, but it is one lever we can pull right now.
Retention is not about gimmicks. It is about respect. Teachers stay when their time is valued, their judgement trusted, and their workload made possible. That is the test I apply to any education reform or solution. Does it respect teachers’ time? Does it trust their judgement? Does it help them do their job better? That is why smarter assessment matters – because without it, we will keep losing the very people who hold up the system.
Rt Hon Michelle Donelan