Effective Leadership Practices in Schools: Approaches to Eliminate Turnover

Introduction

The increase in the shortage of teachers has created difficulty in filling the vacancies with qualified teachers. The problem is becoming worse due to the high turnover of teachers which means an increase in teacher movement out of school or switching the profession (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017). Educational policymakers around the globe are also highly concerned about an increase in teacher turnover rate as it is adversely affecting the education sector (Brown & Wynn, 2009; Hussain et al., 2018; Al-Mahdy & Alazmi, 2021). They are making efforts to reduce the turnover of teachers and increase their retention as it backbone of the educational system (Hoang, 2020) and a key challenge faced by educational leaders (Young, 2018).

The high teacher turnover rates in any educational institute create instability that negatively affects the services received by their students (Ronfeldt et al., 2013), school quality, and student performance (Adnot et al., 2017). Moreover, it can create a financial burden on schools due to the high cost (Carver-Thomas and Darling-Hammond, 2019) and financially affect the whole educational system (Watlington et al., 2010; Synar & Maiden, 2012). Teacher turnover is generally linked to retirement, but the majority of teachers leave their profession because of many other reasons (Podolsky et al., 2016; Carver-Thomas and Darling-Hammond, 2019) as many teachers switch even at the beginning of their career (Scallon et al., 2021). Ingersoll et al. (2018) indicated that 44% of new teachers leave the teaching profession in the first 5 years.

Brownell and Smith (1993) explained that due to inconsistency in the literature, it’s becoming difficult to highlight the factor contributing to teacher turnover clearly. Therefore, many studies suggested highlighting those factors and even the majority of them highlighted some potential factors (e.g., Gonzalez et al., 2008; Räsänen et al., 2020). Moreover, many studies revealed the factors affecting the turnover of teachers in schools (see, Candle, 2010; Tehseen & Hadi, 2015; Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017; Toropova et al., 2021). If schools could enable themselves to examine and address the factors leading to high turnover, they can get the ability to reduce the demand for teachers who are in short supply (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017).