Discrete choice experiments

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Maintaining an adequate supply of teachers in the education sector is both a challenge and an area of significant concern. Of the teachers who qualified in 2013, 67.7 per cent remained in service after five years.^[1] The number of secondary school teachers has been falling since 2010 and the number of teachers leaving for reasons other than retirement has been rising since 2012. Coupled with the fact that the number of secondary pupils is increasing, and is expected to keep rising, this situation has placed intense pressure on teacher supply.

Previous evidence shows that pay is deemed to be one of the most important factors influencing a teacher's decision to stay in a role, together with the workload and flexibility of working hours.^[2] However, up until now, no study has measured the relative importance of all the various factors that could influence teacher retention, nor quantified the impact that changes to these factors could have. To help fill this gap, researchers from RAND Europe analysed the evidence with the use of discrete-choice experiments—the first time, to our knowledge, that this approach has been used to better understand teacher retention and preferences.

An innovative approach

At the core of the project was a survey that contained two discrete-choice experiments (DCEs), in which respondents were presented with ten scenarios of teacher job options, described by pay, rewards and other employment characteristics.

The rigorous design of the DCEss was built on detailed background research, discussion and consultation with experts in the subject area, including members of the School Teachers' Review Body secretariat.

We surveyed 2,210 school teachers in England via Teacher Tapp, an online application, the Survey Engine Ltd platform and the Teacher Voice Omnibus Survey service from the NFER (National Foundation for Educational Research). The survey sample was broadly nationally representative of the teacher population, covered a wide range of school types, school roles and contract types and was drawn from the full spectrum of the pay scale. This provided a robust dataset for our analysis of teachers' preferences.

Policy implications

The choices made by teachers are influenced by a variety of work-related factors, as well as variables related to an individual's current employment and socio-economic characteristics. Previous evidence has repeatedly found that a wide range of factors have influenced teacher retention, such as pay, workload and flexibility of working arrangement, etc. Our findings are consistent with this but go deeper by providing insight into how they interact with each other in teachers' retention choices, quantifying their relative impact and revealing how these preferences differ between different groups of teachers.

No single intervention will effectively resolve teacher workforce shortages. Policies seeking to improve retention rates of teachers are likely to be multi-faceted. Therefore, a set of interventions, developed to target the preferences and expectations of specific groups of teachers, is likely to be necessary.

Using the DCE model output, an accompanying forecasting model was used to provide unique insights into the relative effectiveness of different policy interventions to strengthen or highlight those characteristics of the employment environment that are valued by teachers.

Our study shows which job characteristics matter most to teachers in England, highlights the trade-offs they would be willing to make between pay and other characteristics of the work environment, and provides knowledge of which subgroups of teachers may be more or less responsive to different changes.

Implications from the study that are relevant to policymakers include:

• Supporting schools to improve current working conditions—such as reducing workload, and enabling flexibility of moving to part-time working—could assist in improving teacher retention.
• The levels of support within the school environment and levels of student behaviour are highly valued by teachers.
• Larger pay scale steps and a quicker rate of progress for performance that is rated as excellent are both valued by teachers. The policy focus might therefore be on how to ensure this is applied in a way that is fair and consistent.
• While pay levels are clearly important, this research suggests that investment in non-pay aspects could be highly effective in improving retention, and there could be benefits from undertaking a fuller cost-benefit analysis of different options.

Caveats

All the development work and survey fieldwork took place before the COVID-19 pandemic, which seriously affected England, particularly the education sector. Some attitudes towards teaching may have changed in the light of subsequent experiences.

Endnotes

• [1] Department for Education (DfE), 2019, 'School workforce in England: November 2018.' As of 13 January 2021: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/811622/SWFC_MainText.pdf
• [2] National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), 2018, 'Teacher Retention and Turnover Research—Research Update 4: How Do Teachers Compare to Nurses and Police Officers'. As of 14 December 2020: https://www.nfer.ac.uk/publications/NUFS05/NUFS05.pdf

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Topics

• Educator Well-Being
• Teacher Training
• United Kingdom
• Workforce Management