Top 8 Reasons Teachers Are Quitting Their Jobs — And What It Means

The teacher shortage is one of the most significant and underreported crises in education across the UK, US, Australia, and beyond. Classrooms are going uncovered. Schools are recruiting from overseas at scale. And the people who do enter the profession are leaving faster than they’re being replaced. Understanding the top 8 reasons teachers are quitting their jobs isn’t just important for education policy — it matters for anyone trying to understand a widespread burnout and values crisis that stretches far beyond the school gates.

According to a 2024 National Education Union survey in the UK, 35% of teachers said they were planning to leave the profession within five years. In the United States, the Learning Policy Institute reports that teacher attrition has increased significantly since the pandemic, with early-career teachers leaving at particularly high rates. These aren’t just statistics — they represent hundreds of thousands of individuals who entered teaching with genuine vocation and found the reality unsustainable.

1. Workload That Far Exceeds the School Day

The public perception of teaching — nine to three, long holidays — is one of the most persistent and damaging myths about the profession. The reality, as documented by the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), is that teachers in most countries work significantly more than their contracted hours, with planning, marking, data entry, parental communication, and administrative tasks filling evenings, weekends, and large portions of holidays.

A 2023 survey by Teacher Tapp found that UK secondary teachers were working an average of 55 hours per week during term time. This kind of sustained overwork is directly linked to burnout — and for many teachers, the breaking point comes when they realise that working harder simply produces more work, not better outcomes.

2. Pay That Doesn’t Reflect the Responsibility

In most developed countries, teacher pay has fallen significantly in real terms over the past decade. In England, teacher salaries have lost approximately 19% of their real value since 2010, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. In many US states, starting teacher salaries are below the median wage for college-educated workers. When teachers with postgraduate qualifications, significant responsibility, and high-stakes professional accountability are paid less than comparable professionals in other sectors, the economic case for staying becomes difficult to make — particularly as living costs rise.

3. Increasing Behaviour and Mental Health Challenges in Schools

Post-pandemic data shows a significant rise in challenging behaviour in schools, alongside rising rates of child mental health difficulties. Teachers are often on the front line of both — managing disruption that makes teaching and learning difficult, and supporting children in significant distress with minimal training, time, or specialist backing. Many teachers describe feeling simultaneously overwhelmed by complexity they haven’t been trained for and unsupported by school leadership and external services.

The emotional labour of this — day after day, with 30 students, limited resources, and the personal accountability of being the adult in the room — is significant. And it’s labour that rarely appears in job descriptions or induction programmes.

4. A Culture of Blame and Accountability Without Autonomy

Teaching has become an increasingly high-accountability profession in ways that many teachers experience as antithetical to good practice. The rise of inspection regimes, data-driven performance management, and frequent policy changes has created an environment where teachers feel watched, judged, and held responsible for outcomes over which they have limited control — while simultaneously having their professional autonomy over curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment curtailed. Being held accountable for results while being denied the professional freedom to determine how those results are achieved is a particularly demoralising combination.

5. Lack of Senior Leadership Support

6. The Emotional Toll Is Rarely Acknowledged

Teaching is one of the highest emotional-labour professions in existence. Teachers are required to be emotionally regulated, warm, patient, and relationally skilled for six or more hours a day with large groups of children — many of whom are themselves in difficult circumstances. The emotional effort required to do this well, consistently, across decades, is immense. And in many school cultures, acknowledging that it’s hard is itself discouraged as weakness or unprofessionalism.

This suppression of genuine emotional acknowledgement accelerates burnout significantly. Research on compassion fatigue — particularly from the work of Dr Charles Figley at Tulane University — shows that professions requiring sustained emotional engagement without adequate processing and recovery are particularly high-risk. Teaching fits this profile precisely. For more on recognising when stress is reaching unsustainable levels, these signs you’re more stressed than you think are worth reading for anyone in a high-demand professional role.

7. Policy Instability and Constant Change

Education policy changes with governments, and governments change regularly. Teachers who entered the profession with a clear curriculum, assessment framework, and professional development pathway find that by the end of their careers, they’ve navigated multiple wholesale changes to each — often without evidence that the changes improved outcomes, and always with significant implementation burden falling on them. The cumulative weight of repeated adaptation, retraining, and re-establishing new systems is exhausting, and it signals to many teachers that their professional expertise is not respected by policymakers.

8. The Realisation That the Work Is Endless

8. The Realisation That the Work Is Endless

Perhaps the most demoralising realisation in teaching is that the work is never done. No matter how much you plan, mark, prepare, or communicate, there is always more. You could always give more feedback. Know your students better. Differentiate more effectively. There is no moment where a teacher can look at their workload and feel genuinely complete. This structural endlessness — combined with the emotional weight of feeling responsible for children’s outcomes — creates a particular kind of exhaustion that is very difficult to recover from within the profession.

For teachers who leave, the relief is often described not as escape but as the recovery of a sense of self and a manageable life. Many teachers who leave report significant improvements in mental health within months — a data point that says more about the conditions of the job than the character of the people in it. If you’re in any demanding profession and recognising these patterns, these signs you’re in a toxic workplace and this piece on finding a career that loves you back are worth reading.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the teacher shortage really that serious?

Yes. The UK’s Department for Education has recorded chronic shortfalls in secondary teacher recruitment, particularly in maths, physics, and languages. In the US, 44 states reported teacher shortages in the 2023-24 academic year, according to the Learning Policy Institute. In Australia, the Teacher Education Expert Panel reported that attraction and retention has reached critical levels in most states. This is not a localised or temporary problem — it’s a systemic crisis that is beginning to directly affect the quality of education children receive.

What can be done to retain teachers?

Evidence suggests that the most effective retention strategies address workload, pay, and leadership quality simultaneously — not in isolation. Initiatives that reduce administrative burden without reducing professional autonomy, leadership development that prioritises staff wellbeing alongside school performance, and competitive pay increases for mid-career teachers (not just entry-level) have shown the strongest results in pilot programmes. Crucially, the interventions that don’t work are those that add to what teachers are expected to do without removing anything — additional training days, new reporting requirements, and more inspection frameworks are associated with increased rather than decreased attrition.

I’m a teacher considering leaving — what should I think about?

First: your experience is valid, and the difficulty you’re feeling is not personal failure. The conditions you’re describing are structural, not individual. Second: think carefully about whether what you’d be leaving is teaching itself, or this specific school or role. Many teachers who move to different settings — different key stages, different types of school, different leadership cultures — find the experience genuinely transformed. If you’ve already tried that and the profession still doesn’t feel sustainable, your wellbeing matters more than the job. The skills teaching develops — communication, leadership, empathy, curriculum design, data analysis — transfer well. You have more options than the profession sometimes allows people to believe.

Sources & further reading: APA: Workplace Burnout and Stress | WHO: Mental Health at Work | Harvard Business Review: Beating Burnout.

Cassandra Simpson

Cassandra Simpson is a wellbeing and relationship writer with a BSc in Psychology and five years of experience working in community mental health support. She writes about love, friendship, boundaries, and the emotional work of belonging — drawing on both academic grounding and the hard-won perspective that comes from navigating her own relationship patterns, friendships, and personal growth in real time. Cassandra trained as a peer support facilitator and has spent years exploring attachment theory, interpersonal dynamics, and the psychology of connection. Her writing is shaped by a deep belief that most relationship struggles come not from failure, but from the absence of honest, accessible information about how human connection actually works.