Why are mums leaving teaching?

Women aged 30-39 are the most likely demographic to leave teaching and the profession should do more to address the reasons for this if it wants to stem the recruitment and retention crisis it is facing, according to a new report.

That means doing more on flexible working and childcare, providing equal parental pay, maternity coaching and addressing gender parity at higher levels.

The Missing Mothers report by the New Britain Project, in collaboration with The MTPT Project, says that, since 2017, women in their 30s have consistently been the largest group exiting the teaching profession annually. In 2023, 9,147 women between the ages of 30 – 39 left the state education system. That represents a quarter of the workforce. The report says their loss is particularly damaging due to their experience and the critical mentoring role they play for newer teachers. It also affects the gender pay gap in the profession. Education has one of the highest gender pay gaps, in large part due to the lack of women in leadership posts despite it being a female-dominated profession.

So where do the missing women go?

The report is a follow-up on a 2018 MTPT survey which showed similar exit trends for 30 something women, with the percentage of those leaving the profession at that age being greater than the percentage of men in the profession.

The 2018 report found 23% become stay at home mums, 19% teach in private schools, 10% do tutoring, 7% become an education consultant, 7% teach in international schools and 7% work in charities. That suggests quite a lot of women stay in education, just not in state schools, showing there is much to do to improve the work culture. 

Emma Sheppard, Founder of MTPT, which campaigns for parent teachers, says more research is needed into the long-term outlook and what in, for example, private schools makes the difference to working mums. She cites anecdotal evidence of teachers’ children being allowed a free place, longer holidays, preschool provision on site, smaller class sizes, less stress and less rigidity in how they teach, but adds that on the minus side there may be greater pressure from parents, a higher marking load and potentially fewer maternity rights and more bias, depending on the school.

Solutions

The new report is based on a survey of 962 female teachers, 383 of whom left teaching in the state sector in their thirties and 41 in-depth interviews. Its recommendations for progress centre on maternity coaching, flexible working, childcare, parental pay and representation at senior levels.

It found that for 27% of those who have now left teaching better support transitioning back post maternity leave could have helped them remain in the profession. MTPT runs a parental leave group coaching programme for those who are on leave. It also runs a return to work programme. For both of these it partners with teaching hubs across England, but Sheppard says take-up is patchy in some areas. The project is currently focusing on increasing uptake in the North East, West Midlands and East of England.

On flexible working, Sheppard says that it is not just about part-time working, although many senior leaders assume that it is. For many women it is about ad hoc flexibility – the ability to take their kids to school occasionally, to attend Nativity or other events, to be with them when they are sick and so forth. Covid has also made remote working more possible, with tasks such as strategic planning easier to do from home. Having the ability to work one day a fortnight from home is ‘gold dust’, says Sheppard. Covid has also increased the emotional demands on teachers and forms a major part of the workload and mental health problems they are dealing with, making flexibility even more important, particularly as teachers can see the kind of flexibility those in other professions have benefited from since the pandemic.

Another issue is childcare. The report calls for teachers to be given priority over on-site childcare places. It says that for nearly 40% of teacher-mother respondents who left, access to on-site childcare would have helped them stay in the classroom. 

The report also identifies parental leave policies as crucial to retaining women. Sheppard would like to see a similar equal leave policy offered to teachers as those at the Department for Education get – currently, up to 28 weeks on full pay, followed by 11 weeks of statutory pay. She says, for instance, that some London schools are already offering more than the enhanced parental pay proposed in the Burgundy Book, the employment handbook for schools. 

The importance of evidence

So why don’t a lot of schools  – there are notable exceptions – address these issues? Perhaps the biggest reason, says Sheppard, is lack of time to take a step back and look at the reasons for the exodus and what might best address them. She adds that they seem happier to pay agencies for supply teachers than look at the case for increased parental pay.

“What we need first is the will,” she says. She believes some senior leaders aren’t aware of the importance of the issues parent teachers are facing because they have never had to contend with them. Different arguments will also work better with different trusts – from the retention argument to the argument that the policies the report puts forward will lead to greater equality and happiness. 

For her, equal parental leave could make the most difference and encourage more dads into the profession, particularly at primary level, boost requests for flexibility and increase women’s confidence and independence. She thinks more and more men want to be engaged fathers, but she says teaching is lagging behind this desire for more equal parenting.

She would also like to see schools getting better at collecting and interrogating data so they can come up with solutions that make a difference to the retention crisis. She says they need to drill down into the data. For instance, return rates from maternity leave may not show the attrition rate fully because women may be locked into enhanced maternity pay schemes that require them to return or pay the enhancement back. 

Sheppard says she knows that even some of the biggest trusts don’t collect data on why teachers leave. “They don’t think it’s important,” she says. “But that means they end up looking in the wrong place for why people leave and coming up with the wrong solutions.”

She thinks, however, that the new government may bring change. “The report is timely,” she says, citing the pay rise as evidence Labour is more willing to listen to teachers. She adds that reports that nursery places could move into schools could also help teachers to stay if there is leadership from the top. “I am hopeful,” she says.

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