An understanding of the way mentors and school leaders can support the effective transition of beginning teachers into the teaching profession

Abstract

Retaining newly qualified teachers proves challenging in most educational systems. Statistics suggest that attrition rates have been rising steadily since the 1970s, although these vary across countries (e.g. Smith & Ingersoll, 2004; McKenzie et al., 2005; Ingersoll & Strong, 2011; Sutcher et al., 2016). There are different reasons suggested in literature as to why teachers leave, such as increased employment opportunities, distorted expectations of the workload they would be faced with, idealistic perceptions of teaching and emotional burnout, beginning teachers’ sense of self-efficacy but also the ‘practice shock’ which teachers experience when compared to their experiences of teaching in their pre-service phase (Kyriacou & Kunc, 2007; Hong, 2010; Høigaard et al., 2012; DeNeve & Devos, 2017).