Written evidence submitted by Dr Kathryn Spicksley & Dr Nicholas Stock (ITN0016)

AUTHORS

Dr Kathryn Spicksley

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Birmingham

Dr Nick Stock

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Birmingham

As educational researchers, we explore the complex and varied reasons why people choose to become teachers. Such research is important because it helps to make sense of the disillusionment which early career teachers can feel when they enter the classroom (Perryman & Calvert, 2019). This disillusionment has been identified as an important explanatory factor in the high rate of teacher attrition amongst early career teachers working in schools in England (McLean & Worth, 2025).

This submission draws on our research projects, which include contributions from both primary and secondary teachers.[1] We also both write from personal experience, as teachers who left the profession due to many of the reasons we have explored in our research.

INTRODUCTION

1. Our submission to this important and timely parliamentary inquiry focuses on how to better support intellectually-motivated early career teachers (IM-ECTs). We believe IM-ECTs are a key group to target for support if Labour is to achieve its ambitious commitment to recruit (and then to retain) 6,500 specialist teachers in key subjects (Labour Party, 2024).
2. IM-ECTs have been identified in previous research, for example, in Perryman & Calvert’s (2019) analysis of teacher motivations, in which 36 per cent of a sample of 1200 UCL teacher training alumni reported wanting to teach in order to ‘have an intellectual challenge.’ We share similar expressions of intellectual motivation amongst trainee teachers in our own research, drawn from in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with trainee teachers at the University of Birmingham (interviewees n=4).
3. The low societal status of teachers is a global concern to policymakers (Arnold & Rahimi, 2024). Based on our research findings, we argue that - in England at least - the construction of teaching as an intellectual profession is at risk within cultural, political, and professional discourse. To evidence this, we present a) linguistic evidence from a corpus of 2687 documents (c. 8 million words) concerning teachers and teaching in the UK and b) responses from a qualitative survey distributed to teachers and teacher educators in England (responses n=32).
4. We share concerns that the initial teacher training (ITT) climate in England currently flattens opportunities for IM-ECTs to extend and develop their intellectual interests, and argue that this may contribute to attrition decisions amongst this target group of teaching entrants.
5. We maintain that the recruitment of academically high-performing graduates is important to the teaching profession classroom due to their subject knowledge, passion for learning, and ability to engage learners in the minutiae of their disciplines. These entrants are likely to harbour intellectual motivations for entering and remaining in the profession. Our research therefore highlights a clear incongruity between the desires of an important group of teacher entrants, and the realities they face whilst being socialized into the profession.

II. INTELLECTUALLY-MOTIVATED EARLY CAREER TEACHERS

6. We believe that IM-ECTs should constitute an important element of a healthy, diverse teaching workforce within England. Encouraging academically high-performing entrants into the teaching profession has been a policy aim globally and in England for many years (see, for example, Barber & Mourshed, 2007). In England, efforts to recruit academically high-performing teachers can be seen in the development of Teach First, and related programmes formerly funded by the Department for Education (DfE), including Now Teach and Researchers in Schools. Given that academically high-performing entrants to the teaching profession are likely to have enjoyed their academic studies, we assume that there is likely to be an overlap between academically high-attaining ECTs and IM-ECTs, and therefore it is beneficial to consider specific issues which may be detrimental to the long-term commitment of IM-ECTs.
7. Our research suggests that intellectual motivations are a primary consideration for some entrants to the profession. Stock’s research has been a series of in-depth unstructured interviews with four trainee teachers at the University of Birmingham on the Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programme. In the open forum of these research interviews, participants regularly cited the importance of teaching as an intellectual profession:

Willow:[2] one reason why I've gone into teaching is because, like I said previously, I feel like now I actually have the time to think and and and I'm back in a world of of creativity, of academia.

Jack: I'm not going to not going to beat around the bush [about my ability in chemistry] and it might, you know, give them something to it might be like oh wow. So like, you know, I give them something to aspire to or, you know, like a type of goal or something.

Such responses posit the teacher identity qua intellectual as both desirable and pose the future issue of it being potentially lacking. In the first example from Willow, a statement similar to many she made at other points, she not only prioritises the importance of the academic side of teaching found in the university and in her wider reading but also aligns it with creativity. She goes on to discuss working on ‘novels’ and ‘poetry’ alongside her teaching, seeing the two as fundamentally tied together. In Jack’s response, again a statement similar to others he made in other interviews, he emphasises the importance of his intellectual ability in Chemistry and the opportunity to demonstrate it to the students. He also discusses the importance of ‘knowledge’ and students ‘thinking’ in his classroom in light of his teaching.

III: RECRUITING INTELLECTUALLY-MOTIVATED ENTRANTS TO TEACHING

8. Our research suggests that teaching is not primarily constructed as an intellectual profession within everyday cultural and political discourse. Instead, discourse concerning teachers emphasises training and doing rather than thinking. This may be off-putting to potential entrants to the teaching profession who are intellectually-motivated.
9. Spicksley has compiled a corpus of 2684 texts concerning teachers and teaching in England, with a specific focus on documents aimed at or concerning early career teachers (the Teachers and Teaching Corpus, or T&TC). Documents include speeches by DfE ministers, media reports, qualitative survey responses collected from the general public within the Mass Observation archive project (Mass Observation Archive, 2025), Ofsted reports, written evidence submitted to previous parliamentary inquiries, and documents associated with the 2019 Early Career Framework (ECF). In total, this corpus includes almost 8 million words and has been analysed rigorously using methodologies and tools borrowed from corpus linguistics using the freely-available software Lancsbox. Using this corpus, we are able to identify the verbs most frequently associated with teacher*[3] in the T&TC. Discounting modal and auxiliary verbs (which occur in combination with another verb), the verbs most commonly associated with teacher* are use (1021 occurrences in close proximity to teacher*, qualify (958), and train (884). In contrast, the verb know occurs 557 times in close proximity to teacher, and the verb think collocates 415 times (Brezina, Weill-Tessier & McEnery, 2020). Using this corpus, we are able to identify the verbs most frequently associated with teacher*[4] in the T&TC. Discounting modal and auxiliary verbs (which occur in combination with another verb), the verbs most commonly associated with teacher* are use (1021 occurrences in close proximity to teacher*, qualify (958), and train (884). In contrast, the verb know occurs 557 times in close proximity to teacher, and the verb think collocates 415 times.
10. Our research with teachers suggests that the multifaceted reasons why people join and stay in the profession have often been flattened by recruitment materials which belie the complex job of the teacher. Teachers and teacher educators responding to Spicksley’s small-scale, qualitative online survey launched in 2023 (n=32) described their responses to DfE recruitment campaigns thus:

ID-18:[5] Teacher recruitment adverts highlight only a very small part of teaching, when a child really gets something; a fun interactive part of a lesson and supporting a child who wants to be helped. It doesn’t highlight the behind the scenes work that we do that goes into that.

ID-22: Teacher recruitment adverts are a joke as very few teachers ever feel that warm glow inside because as soon as you get a moment like that you are no doubt

reminded of the total pile of shit that is waiting around the corner for you.

ID-26: Teachers are often portrayed as Good People doing their best in difficult circumstances [...] DfE advertising for recruitment sends a similar message about the martyr role of the teacher.

These teachers indicate their frustration with recruitment campaigns that do not accurately reflect the complexity of their working lives, foregrounding classroom experiences at the expense of accurately representing the 'behind the scenes work'. Much of this behind the scenes work is intellectual in nature – planning how to make a complex topic accessible to a group learning it for the first time, for example.

11. Many respondents to this survey expressed frustration that the general public had severe misconceptions about the demands placed upon teachers:

ID-8: Many people see teachers as babysitters [...] Day to day life is never summed up accurately.

ID-13: We often seem to be treated as little more than free childcare.

ID-26: The extent to which the job has expanded well beyond classroom work in recent years due to huge cuts in other areas is simply not understood.

Although in these responses explicit discussion of the intellectual demands of the job was absent, contributors clearly indicated a frustration amongst members of the teaching profession that their job is seen as lacking in expertise or intellectual effort. This is implied by the comments in which teachers argue that their job is often understood as being little more than ‘babysitting’. Our research therefore indicates that teachers’ perception of their social status is low, aligning with the findings of Education International’s 2024 Global Teacher Status Report (Arnold & Rahimi, 2024), which identified that ‘Despite being recognised for their critical societal role, teachers are undervalued compared to other professions’ (p. 8).

IV: RETAINING INTELLECTUALLY-MOTIVATED TEACHERS

12. Literature on the socialization of new teachers into the profession has long recognised that entrants with high academic attainment are at a higher risk of disillusionment and (consequently) attrition. Lacey (1977) noted that academically high-performing beginning teachers quickly became frustrated with teaching and often moved on to education roles outside schools. In England, teachers trained through the Teach First route are statistically more likely to leave the profession, with a recent NFER report (McLean & Worth, 2023) evidencing that only 60 per cent remain in teaching after their Newly Qualified Teacher (NQT) year. A long history of research into teacher retention therefore recognises IM-ECTs as a risky group in terms of long-term commitment.
13. We are concerned that once employed in a teaching post, opportunities to build on intellectual interests are narrowed by the nature of teacher training and professional development in England. This contributes to the dissatisfaction of IM-ECTs and, in turn, increases the likelihood of their attrition from teacher training courses and their first teaching posts. Though we recognise that teacher professional development pathways call for evidence-informed teaching backed by research (DfE, 2017), we are concerned that the forms of research presented to early career teachers and those mentoring them are incredibly narrow and foreclose the possibility of other forms of thinking about/doing teaching. There is also little opportunity for IM-ECTs to explore their position as intellectuals in the training to become a teacher, nor in the process of teaching in a school, by practising and developing forms of research themselves. As is clear in the 2024 Initial Teacher Training and Early Career Framework (ITTECF) and associated policy documents, research into education is based primarily in cognitive-psychology, with limited reference to other educational disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, or critical psychology – a point made repeatedly in recent research into teacher training (see, for example, Hordern & Brooks, 2023). The omission of other forms of research and thinking do not allow for the possibility of teachers seeing themselves as intellectuals with the exception of those already aligned with the approaches being demanded. It is also important to note that very rarely was the current research paradigm raised by participants in Stock’s research as an intellectual pursuit, with preferences, for example, for critical approaches, philosophy, and artistic approaches. Not only are these approaches currently neglected in the ITTECF, they are also absent from the professional development of teachers.
14. Returning to the T&TC, additional analysis undertaken to determine the frequency of the noun/verb combination teacher* think* suggests that there may be a discrepancy between how the professional identity of the teacher is constructed during training and within everyday discourse. It is notable that there were no occurrences of teacher* think* in the Mass Observation survey responses, suggesting that teachers are rarely constructed as ‘thinking’ in everyday cultural discourse. In contrast, occurrences of the teacher* think* combination were most frequent in ECF documents (appearing 18 times), suggesting that teachers and teacher educators working through documents associated with the ECF are exposed more frequently to a discourse which constructs teaching as requiring intellectual engagement. For IM-ECTs who have entered the profession hoping for a job which is intellectually challenging and fulfilling, this discrepancy between how their role is positioned in training documentation in comparison with other areas of discourse concerning teachers and teaching is potentially harmful, causing cognitive dissonance. IM-ECTs may come to expect that they approach the job as intellectuals in response to the ECF, but then find that these expectations are not reflected in other areas of their lives and work.

V: CONCLUSION & RECOMMENDATIONS

15. Our research indicates that a significant number of trainee teachers may be attracted to the apparent potential offered by the teaching profession to develop and extend their intellectual interests and knowledge in a specific subject area. We have referred to this group as IM-ECTs and shared our concerns that the needs and professional desires of this group are not being adequately met within the England’s current teacher training and professional development environment. In the following paragraphs 17, 18, and 19 we make three recommendations which we believe could support effective recruitment and retention of IM-ECTs.
16. We recommend financial investment in efforts to recouple universities and schools as training partners. Since 2010 there has been a sustained political drive towards locating teacher training and ongoing professional development outside universities. IM-ECTs will have enjoyed the intellectual challenge and rigour of learning within a university environment, and will likely be interested in exploring the interaction between theory and practice as they develop as a teacher. For IM-ECTs, such political efforts to decouple universities and schools are likely to have a negative impact on their professional identity and commitment.
17. We recommend that the English government follow the example of Wales and Scotland in positioning teaching as a Master’s level profession. IM-ECTs are likely to be attracted to the opportunity to study at Master’s level within a university environment, and to align their professional identities to that of a practitioner-researcher. We believe that offering pathways for teachers to pursue their intellectual interests through Masters’ level study, or individual research-oriented modules located within universities, is likely to help retain IM-ECTs within the profession. Subsidised university modules could be made available as a retention incentive for teachers who have worked a certain number of years in the classroom. In the long-term, such incentives could be explored as an alternative to encouraging IM-ECTs to stay in the profession, alongside other financial incentives such as training bursaries in shortage subjects (NFER, 2023) and ‘golden hellos’ (Walker, 2023).
18. We recommend that official Department for Education (DfE) communications utilize the wealth of qualitative educational research which has been conducted on teachers’ working lives, professional commitment and motivations to construct a more nuanced presentation of the role of the teacher. Teaching is a complex profession, with intellectual, social, physical, and ethical demands made of teachers on a daily basis. Representing these demands more accurately in political statements about teachers and in recruitment materials would likely have a positive impact on IM-ECTs. More emphasis could be placed, for example, on representing how teams of teachers plan together, collaboratively, to think about the best way to explain a challenging concept in an engaging way. Such representations may be more appealing to IM-ECTs who are motivated by the intellectual challenges of teaching than the standard image of the lone teacher inspiring a difficult class.

REFERENCES

Arnold, B. & Rahimi, M. (2024) The Global Status of Teachers 2024. https://www.ei-ie.org/en/item/29412:the-global-status-of-teachers-2024 

Barber, M. & Mourshed, M. (2007) How the world’s best performing education systems come out on top. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-insights/how-the-worlds-best-performing-school-systems-come-out-on-top

Brezina, V., Weill-Tessier, P., & McEnery, A. (2020). #LancsBox v. 5.x. [software]. http://corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox.

DfE (2017) Evidence-informed teaching: evaluation of progress in England. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/evidence-informed-teaching-evaluation-of-progress-in-england

DfE (2019) Early Career Framework. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/early-career-framework

DfE (2024) Initial Teacher Training and Early Career Framework. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/initial-teacher-training-and-early-career-framework

Hordern, J. and Brooks, C. (2023) ‘The core content framework and the ‘new science’ of educational research’, Oxford Review of Education, 49(6), pp. 800–818. doi: 10.1080/03054985.2023.2182768.

Labour Party (2024) Change. Labour Party Manifesto 2024. https://labour.org.uk/change/

Lacey, C. (1977) The Socialization of Teachers. London: Methuen.

Mass Observation Archive (2025) Mass Observation Archive: An archive of everyday life, thought and feeling in Britain. https://massobs.org.uk/

McLean, D. & Worth, J. (2023) The Progress and Retention of Teach First teachers. Slough: NFER. https://www.nfer.ac.uk/media/v5jmvos0/the_progression_and_retention_of_teach_first_teachers.pdf

McLean, D. and Worth, J. (2025). Teacher Labour Market in England: Annual Report 2025. Slough: NFER. https://www.nfer.ac.uk/publications/teacher-labour-market-in-england-annual-report-2025/

NFER (2023) Teacher training bursaries are effective at supporting long-term teacher supply. https://www.nfer.ac.uk/press-releases/teacher-training-bursaries-are-effective-at-supporting-long-term-teacher-supply/

Perryman, J. and Calvert, G. (2019) ‘WHAT MOTIVATES PEOPLE TO TEACH, AND WHY DO THEY LEAVE? ACCOUNTABILITY, PERFORMATIVITY AND TEACHER RETENTION’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 68(1), pp. 3–23. doi: 10.1080/00071005.2019.1589417.

Walker, A. (2023) ‘Schools offer £10k ‘golden hellos’ - but with a big catch.’ Schools Week, 12 May. https://schoolsweek.co.uk/schools-offer-10k-golden-hellos-but-with-a-big-catch/

May 2025