Every summer, the Department for Education (DfE) publishes its School Workforce Census — and every summer, the same catastrophe appears in the tables. Tens of thousands of teachers leave the state-funded sector in England each year, and the leavers are disproportionately those at the start of their careers. Behind the recruitment adverts sits a simple truth — the cheapest teacher to recruit is the one you already have.
Four years of leavers
The numbers tell a consistent story. In 2020/21, 36,179 qualified teachers left the state-funded sector in England. In 2021/22 that figure jumped to 43,997 — 9.7% of all qualified teachers, and a level the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) described as the highest since records began in 2010 (DfE School Workforce Census, reported by TES, 2023). The 2022/3 census and the 2023/24 census show the outflow easing only slightly: excluding retirements, 38,788 teachers left in 2022/23 and 37,413 in 2023/24 — in each case roughly 9% of the entire teaching workforce walking out of the door in a single year (DfE, 2025; House of Commons Library, 2025). Whichever year you choose, the arithmetic is brutal: at around 37,000–38,000 leavers a year, England is losing roughly a hundred teachers a day — the equivalent of a large secondary school’s entire teaching staff, every single day.
Early Career Teachers: where the profession leaks fastest
The most sobering figures concern teachers at the very start of their careers. Of the 21,705 new teachers who qualified in 2022, 2,453 — 11.3% — had left the state sector within one year (DfE data, analysed by TES, 2024). The latest census puts the one-year loss for the 2023 cohort at 10.3%: even in an improving year, more than one in ten new teachers are gone before their second September. The House of Commons Library (2025) notes that, in recent years, between 10% and 15% of teachers have left within their first year.
Stretch the data window to five years and the leak becomes a flood: 32.4% of a cohort — very nearly one-third — have left the state-funded sector by the end of their fifth year of teaching (DfE School Workforce Census 2024), a figure the Commons Library places at 30–33% across recent cohorts. In human terms, of a typical qualifying cohort of twenty-odd thousand, roughly 7,000 people who trained, qualified and began careers in our classrooms have left within five years. Between 2010 and 2022, 40,438 teachers left within a year of qualifying (TES, 2024). Each departure leads to a school spending many thousands of pounds in recruitment, cover and induction, and costs pupils disruption to their education — something no budget line measures.
The wellbeing connection
Why do teachers leave? Rarely because teaching itself was the wrong choice. Survey after survey focuses on the same answers: workload, work-life balance, and the burnout they produce. Education Support’s Teacher Wellbeing Index (2025) found that 29% of teachers and education staff have actively taken steps to change or leave their role because of wellbeing pressures — and among those considering leaving, 66% cite the volume of workload. The Index records the workforce’s worst wellbeing scores since 2019, with 78% of staff stressed. Attrition, in other words, is not a recruitment challenge with a wellbeing footnote; it is a wellbeing problem leading to recruitment problems. Education Support has called for a national retention strategy, with staff wellbeing at its core.
What schools can do about teachers leaving — and how Teach WellToolkit helps
As teachers leave because of wellbeing, then improving wellbeing is arguably the most cost-effective strategy retention strategy. Teach Well Toolkit helps by starting with a FREE Staff Wellbeing Survey: an honest, anonymous baseline of how your staff are really doing, before any teacher writes a resignation letter. Signing up to Teach Well Toolkit School Membership then converts your data into action, with our support every step of the way.
Cost-effective School Membership includes:
· An action plan built on what your staff said about their wellbeing
· Accredited Level 2 First Aid for Mental Health training, so struggling colleagues have
someone to turn to
· Mental Health Lead training and termly support
· The Teach Well Programme — self-help modules for every member of staff, and a
step-by-step whole-school method for leadership, including how to reduce workload
· Schools can evidence their support for staff through the Teach Well Staff Wellbeing Award. This is a recruitment advantage as it sends a positive message to prospective applicants, as well as encouraging existing staff to stay.
A third of new teachersleaving within five years is not inevitable. It is the sum of many decisions — and every decision is influenced by how working in a particular school impacts on individual wellbeing. Find out how your staff are doing by signing up now to
our FREE Staff Wellbeing Survey.
References
Department for Education (2025) School Workforce in England 2024. Published 5 June 2025. Available at: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-workforce-in-england
Education Support (2025) TeacherWellbeing Index 2025. Available at:
https://www.educationsupport.org.uk/resources/for-organisations/research/teacher-wellbeing-index/
House of Commons Library (2025) Teacher recruitment and retention in England. Research Briefing CBP-7222.
Available at: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7222/
TES (2023) Teachers leaving at highest rate in four years. Available at:
https://www.tes.com/magazine/news/general/retention-crisis-teachers-leaving-highest-rate-years
TES (2024) The scale of the teacherretention crisis revealed. Available at:
https://www.tes.com/magazine/analysis/general/teacher-retention-scale-crisis-revealed-dfe-data