Mitigating the impact of COVID-19 disruption on the quality and retention of trainee and newly qualified secondary school teachers

This project documents the impact of the substantial changes and sustained disruption caused by COVID-19 to the development of secondary school teachers, during their training and newly qualified teacher (NQT) years, and will produce a set of recommendations to enhance teacher quality and retention. Failure to respond now means that 60,000 teachers, working in secondary schools across the UK, will not have sufficient expertise and may rapidly leave the profession. This lack of expertise and high attrition will have a serious impact on the educational outcomes of young people who have already faced significant disadvantage through school closures and ongoing COVID-19-related disruption. Findings from a pilot study underline the extensive challenges facing trainee and NQT teachers and the future learning that needs to be urgently addressed by the Initial Teacher Training (ITT) sector. This project will produce research-informed recommendations that will mitigate COVID-19-related disruptions on teacher quality and retention. Research findings will be generated through analysis of responses gathered from questionnaires and remote interviews with trainees, NQTs, school leaders, and ITT staff based in both schools and university, based on a sample of 400 teachers trained at King's College London (KCL). The project timeline includes interviews across 18 months so that participants' experiences are captured during both the training year and the first year of practice as an NQT. This will provide rich understandings of the impacts of COVID-19 on teacher quality and retention that will have relevance for policy makers, school leaders and ITT providers across the UK.