When ‘quality’ collides: why do committed early career teachers leave?

Early Career Teachers (ECTs) have long been positioned as key to addressing persistent teacher shortages in Australia’s hardest-to-staff schools. While recent policies have emphasised attracting ECTs to these challenging contexts, far less attention has been paid to the conditions necessary for their long-term retention in these settings. This study draws on 5 years of longitudinal data from four ECTs working in a hardest-to-staff metropolitan secondary school in Victoria. Our analysis reveals that a key factor influencing their premature departure was a misalignment between the ECTs’ understanding of professionalism, rooted in context-sensitive judgement and responsiveness to student needs, and the school leadership’s top-down, standardised conception of professional practice, driven by decontextualised quality benchmarks. We show how this disconnect contributed to a sustained process of demoralisation and ultimately led to their exit decision within three to 4 years. We conclude by exploring the implications of our data for strengthening ECT retention strategies in Australia’s most challenging school settings.