‘Should I stay or should I go?’ Staff turnover in secondary schools – voices from four case studies in Cambridgeshire

Item

Title
‘Should I stay or should I go?’ Staff turnover in secondary schools – voices from four case studies in Cambridgeshire
Description
This is a dual-purpose paper. It is both a work-in-progress report as well as the expansion of a presentation to be given at the forthcoming Kaleidoscope 2023 conference. It therefore addresses one of the Kaleidoscope 2023 themes, resilience in education. The paper uses qualitative data extracted from my ongoing PhD research project that investigates the relationship between the everyday lives of all school staff, their working conditions, and their wellbeing. The aim of that project is to see if there are policies and design interventions that might improve the working lives of all school workers. The Introduction summarises the problem of recruitment and retention, both locally and globally. By reference to recent post-Pandemic research and current (April 2023) industrial unrest it suggests the importance of continuing research in this area. The Methodologies section details the theories underpinning the mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods that have been used in my PhD research and the way in which I have extracted the ‘voices’ that form the body of this paper. The Results are selected quotations from the interviews conducted with 12 members of staff in the 4 schools that were studied. My Discussion focusses on the interviewees’ feelings about themselves, and sheds light on sources of job satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The article concludes with ideas about what these voices tell us about resilience and suggests possible future work based on employee experience design.
Creator
Baker, David
Subject
School staff
recruitment
retention
resilience
self-image
employee experience
Publisher
CERJ, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge
Date
2023-12-18T11:10:00Z
2023-12-14
Type
Article
Format
application/pdf
Identifier
https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/362427
https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.104609
Language
eng
Rights
CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 DEED
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
Item sets
Cambridge Educational Research e-Journal (CERJ)