Teacher Retention in a London primary school

Teacher retention in the UK has reached crisis level according to many resources. The paper attempts to provide an overview of the extent of the problem and its impacts, the factors that make a teacher wanting to leave especially in state-funded London primary schools and how some schools manage to keep a high teacher retention. Then it explores the same issues again but from the point of view of the headteacher and teachers of the author’s school. The results show that the efforts of the management, which are based on an understanding of the factors that could drive teachers away, play an important role in retaining the teachers. They also reveal that there are other independent (i.e. not directly resulting from the management’s efforts) factors, that influence high retention within the school such as royalty and ethics.