The Impact of School Leadership on Teacher Retention: Where Teachers Stay and How They Thrive?

A School of Education Seminar hosted by the Centre for Research in Educational Leadership and Management 

Presented by Professor Qing Gu, Director of the UCL Centre for Educational Leadership and Professor of Leadership in Education, University College London Institute of Education   

Investing in teachers’ career-long professional development has been regarded by policy makers as a cost-effective approach to retaining committed and capable teachers. However, teacher retention remains a real challenge for England despite concerted effort. This paper draws upon evidence from a four-year mixed methods study on the impact of the government-funded Early Career Framework (ECF) programme on retention. Evidence shows that the ECF teacher induction programme alone is unable to ‘transform’ the desired learning as envisaged in the reform strategy. School leadership that prioritises and enables collaborative teacher development is a necessary condition for securing early career teachers’ learning, development and retention. How satisfied teachers feel about their job, how well they teach (i.e., teacher efficacy), and how they perceive the quality of their lives in school (i.e., teacher wellbeing) are dependent upon the quality of professional learning cultures that are created and sustained by school leadership.  

Professor Qing Gu joined the University College London (UCL) Institute of Education as Director of the UCL Centre for Educational Leadership and Professor of Leadership in Education in October 2018. She is the Past Chair of the British Association of Comparative and International Education (BAICE), Co-Editor-in-Chief of Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, Associate Editor of International Journal of Educational Development, a member of the Research Standing Committee of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES), and a member of the Research Evidence and Impact Panel for the Leadership College for UK Government. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Pacific Centre for Leadership and Change (APCLC) and Honorary Professor in the Department of Education Policy and Leadership at the Education University of Hong Kong. She was conferred the Award of Fellow of the Royal Society Arts (FRSA) in 2016 and the Award of Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) for her contribution to social science in 2022.  

Before Professor Qing Gu joined UCL, she was Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham where she started her academic career as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in 2004, upon completion of her PhD at the University of Birmingham.