50 Leading Thought Leaders on Teacher Retention

Introduction

Every school year, approximately one in seven public school teachers leaves the profession or moves to a different school. That figure, drawn from the Learning Policy Institute's 2026 analysis of teacher turnover in the United States, represents something far more consequential than a staffing statistic. It represents classrooms without continuity, students who lose the adults they have come to trust, and schools forced to hire under-qualified replacements who are themselves two and a half times more likely to leave within a year. The global picture is no more encouraging. UNESCO estimates that addressing the worldwide teacher shortage would require an additional investment of approximately $120 billion annually in salaries alone over the next five years. Meanwhile, RAND's 2025 State of the American Teacher survey found that 53 percent of K-12 teachers reported experiencing burnout, a figure that has remained stubbornly above 50 percent every year since 2021.

These numbers point to a profession under sustained, structural pressure. They are not the result of bad individual decisions by teachers who simply chose wrong. They reflect the predictable consequences of chronic underinvestment in working conditions, professional autonomy, and the organisational health of schools. The teachers who stay in the profession are not tougher or more committed than those who leave. They are, in most cases, working in better conditions.

Understanding teacher retention is not a secondary concern for school leaders. It is the central leadership challenge of the current era. Every unresolved retention problem is also a school culture problem, a student achievement problem, and a leadership credibility problem. The revolving door of educators does not just cost money. It costs the institutional memory and relational trust on which excellent schools depend.

The thought leaders on this list are the people doing the most rigorous and credible work to understand why teachers leave, what makes them stay, and what school systems, district leaders, and individual principals can do about it. They represent researchers, policy advocates, practitioner voices, union leaders, equity champions, and international observers. They are not recycled household names from the general leadership conversation. They are the genuine experts in this specific and consequential field.

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, with over 10,000 copies sold globally, who works with school leadership teams around the world on the team dynamics, communication, and culture foundations that retention depends on. The people on this list are the thinkers. Jonno is the person you bring in when you are ready to act on what they say. To explore how Jonno's facilitation work might support your school's leadership team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Teacher Retention Matters

The case for taking teacher retention seriously does not rest on moral argument alone, though the moral case is strong. It rests on evidence. Research consistently shows that high teacher turnover rates reduce student achievement across an entire school, not just in the classrooms of the teachers who leave. Schools with chronically high turnover are unable to build the collaborative professional relationships, shared instructional language, and accumulated knowledge of their students that characterise high-performing school cultures. Every new teacher who arrives replaces experience with uncertainty, and the cost of that uncertainty falls directly on students.

The financial costs are significant. Replacing a single teacher costs a school or district anywhere from $11,860 to $24,930 when recruitment, onboarding, and lost productivity are accounted for. Schools serving the students with the greatest learning needs also tend to have the highest turnover rates, creating a compounding equity problem: the schools that most need stable, experienced teachers are the least likely to have them.

The deeper cost is cultural. A school that cannot retain its teachers cannot build the coherent, trusting professional community that drives continuous improvement. It cannot implement a new curriculum with fidelity because the people who designed it have moved on. It cannot sustain a pastoral culture because the relationships between staff and students reset every year. Retention is not a human resources problem that sits alongside the real work of schooling. It is the precondition for that work.

Jonno White works with school leadership teams to build the psychological safety, communication clarity, and team alignment that make schools places people want to stay. To discuss how Jonno might support your leadership team, email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is often far more affordable than schools expect, and virtual sessions are available.

How This List Was Compiled

This directory focuses on people who are genuinely contributing to the global conversation on teacher retention: researchers producing evidence that shapes policy, advocates translating research into system-level action, union leaders fighting for the working conditions that retention requires, practitioners modelling what sustainable school cultures look like, and international voices keeping the conversation from being dominated by any single national context. The list deliberately surfaces voices the reader may not yet have encountered alongside the established names they will recognise. Geographic and disciplinary diversity were applied as active selection criteria: no single country represents more than half the list, and the range of professional contexts spans academic research, policy advocacy, teacher unions, school leadership, and independent practice. Every person on this list is actively contributing to the field in 2025 or 2026 through published research, policy work, professional practice, or public advocacy.

Foundational Researchers: The People Who Built the Evidence Base

The retention conversation rests on a body of research that stretches back decades. This group of researchers built the evidence base that everyone else draws on. Their work established the core findings that teacher turnover is an organisational problem, not just an individual one; that working conditions matter more than most policy interventions acknowledge; and that the revolving door of early-career teacher attrition is a predictable, measurable, and solvable phenomenon.

1. Richard Ingersoll | University of Pennsylvania

The intellectual foundation of the modern teacher retention field rests substantially on Richard Ingersoll's shoulders. A Professor Emeritus of Education and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education, Ingersoll spent decades producing empirical research that reframed the teacher shortage as a working conditions problem rather than a supply problem. His 2001 paper in the American Educational Research Journal, which has been cited more than 6,500 times, documented the systemic character of teacher turnover and its connection to poor management, low pay, and inadequate support.

Ingersoll's most recent work, published in 2025 and co-authored with Lennon Audrain and Mary Laski of Arizona State University, examined a team-based staffing model as an alternative to the traditional isolated classroom structure, finding that the sink-or-swim conditions of solo classroom teaching are a primary driver of early career attrition. His research directly challenges the assumption that the solution to teacher shortages lies primarily in recruiting more people into the profession, arguing instead that the profession's inability to retain the people it already trains is the central problem.

2. Linda Darling-Hammond | Learning Policy Institute / Stanford University

Few figures have shaped education policy more directly or more consistently than Linda Darling-Hammond. Now serving as Chief Knowledge Officer at the Learning Policy Institute, having founded and led it as President and CEO from 2015 to 2025, she is also the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University. Her career spans classroom teaching, federal policy advising, and foundational research on teacher quality, equity, and the conditions that sustain an effective teaching workforce.

Darling-Hammond's landmark work Teacher Turnover: Why It Matters and What We Can Do About It, co-authored with Desiree Carver-Thomas, remains one of the most comprehensive analyses of the structural drivers of teacher attrition. Her broader body of work, spanning more than 500 publications and 25 books, consistently argues that the United States and similar systems perpetuate teacher shortages by underinvesting in preparation, compensation, and working conditions. She was the principal investigator for the team that designed the federal Schools and Staffing Surveys and has advised both the Obama and Biden administrations on educator workforce policy.

3. Desiree Carver-Thomas | Learning Policy Institute

Desiree Carver-Thomas is a Senior Researcher and Policy Analyst at the Learning Policy Institute, where she co-leads the Educator Quality team and leads the Racial Equity Leadership Network team. Her research sits at the intersection of teacher quality, workforce diversity, and the conditions that attract and retain teachers of colour. She began her career as a bilingual and special education teacher in New York City public schools, which gives her research a practitioner grounding that distinguishes it from purely academic analysis.

Her most recent major publication, Supporting and Sustaining a Diverse Teacher Workforce (2025), co-authored with Melanie Leung-Gage and Emma Garcia, documents how teacher turnover disproportionately affects the pipeline of educators of colour and outlines evidence-based strategies for improving retention across a diverse workforce. Her earlier landmark report Teacher Turnover: Why It Matters and What We Can Do About It, co-authored with Linda Darling-Hammond, is foundational reading for any school leader or policymaker serious about the field.

4. Matthew Kraft | Brown University

Matthew Kraft is a Professor of Education and Economics at Brown University and one of the most prolific and widely cited researchers on teacher working conditions and retention in the current generation. His scholarship spans teacher hiring, professional development, evaluation, working conditions, and the economics of teacher labour markets. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles and his work has been cited in The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Economist, reflecting his ability to translate rigorous research into accessible public discourse.

Kraft served as a Senior Economist in the White House Council of Economic Advisers under the Biden administration in 2024 to 2025, bringing his research directly into federal policy development. In 2026, he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for his planned research into how to revitalise the teaching profession in the United States, which he described as his most ambitious research goal to date. His work on school organisational contexts and teacher turnover, conducted with co-authors examining New York City middle schools, found that improvements in school safety and academic expectations predicted faster growth in student achievement, establishing the direct link between working conditions, retention, and student outcomes.

5. Doris Santoro | Bowdoin College

Doris Santoro is a Professor and Chair of the Education Department at Bowdoin College, and the author of Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay. Her most distinctive contribution to the retention conversation is her argument that many teacher departures are not the result of burnout or incompetence but of what she calls demoralization: the erosion of the moral rewards that led people into teaching. Demoralized teachers are not exhausted or incapable; they are disillusioned by the conditions they are asked to work within.

This framing matters because it points toward different solutions than the burnout literature. Burnout interventions focus on individual resilience and self-care. Demoralization interventions require addressing the systemic conditions, scripted curricula, excessive testing regimes, loss of professional autonomy, that strip teaching of its moral meaning. Santoro's work has been particularly influential in school leadership conversations about why talented, caring teachers leave despite feeling professionally capable.

Policy Researchers and Think Tank Voices

This group works at the intersection of research and policy, producing the analyses that shape how governments and school systems respond to the retention crisis. Their work tends to be more applied than foundational academic research, focused on identifying what works and translating evidence into practical policy recommendations.

6. Anne Podolsky | Learning Policy Institute

Anne Podolsky is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Learning Policy Institute whose research focuses on teacher preparation, working conditions, and the conditions that support teacher retention across a career. She is the lead author of Solving the Teacher Shortage: How to Attract and Retain Excellent Educators, which remains one of the most comprehensive guides to evidence-based retention policy available. Her work addresses both the pipeline problem and the conditions problem, arguing that they must be solved simultaneously rather than sequentially.

Podolsky's research on how teaching experience increases teacher effectiveness over time is particularly relevant to retention advocates: it establishes that every teacher who leaves in the first five years represents not just a replacement cost but a compounding loss of effectiveness that would have grown with experience. Her combination of rigorous data analysis and accessible policy writing makes her work essential reading for district leaders and policymakers.

7. Tiffany Tan | Learning Policy Institute

Tiffany Tan is a Policy and Research Associate at the Learning Policy Institute whose 2026 report Teacher Turnover in the United States: Who Moves, Who Leaves, and Why, co-authored with Wesley Wei, Desiree Carver-Thomas, and Emma Garcia, provides the most current comprehensive national picture of teacher turnover patterns. Her work documents that turnover rates in the United States are higher than in the 1990s and higher than in leading international education systems, challenging narratives that suggest the current shortage is either new or inevitable.

Tan's analysis examines how turnover patterns differ across teacher demographics, school contexts, and subject areas, providing the disaggregated data that system leaders need to design targeted rather than generic retention interventions. Her research represents the current frontier of teacher workforce data analysis at the national scale.

8. Wesley Wei | Learning Policy Institute

Wesley Wei is a Policy and Research Associate at the Learning Policy Institute and a co-author of the 2026 Teacher Turnover report. His work focuses on educator workforce data, teacher supply and demand, and the policy levers available to school systems managing persistent turnover. Wei brings a quantitative rigour to the LPI's teacher workforce research that makes its findings credible with state and federal policymakers who require robust data rather than case studies.

His contribution to the national teacher turnover analysis represents the kind of detailed, methodologically sound research that underpins effective policy: it does not just document that turnover is a problem but identifies the specific contexts, demographics, and school conditions in which it is most acute, pointing directly toward where interventions are most needed.

9. Melanie Leung-Gage | Learning Policy Institute

Melanie Leung-Gage is a Policy and Research Associate at the Learning Policy Institute whose work focuses on teacher workforce diversity, equity, and the conditions that support teachers of colour. She is a co-author of the 2025 report Supporting and Sustaining a Diverse Teacher Workforce, which documents the relationship between teacher preparation quality, teacher diversity, and retention outcomes. Her research sits at the intersection of equity and workforce policy, arguing that improving retention overall requires specific attention to the distinct barriers faced by teachers of colour.

Leung-Gage's work is particularly valuable for school leaders in diverse communities: it identifies the specific preparation and support conditions that are most closely associated with retention of teachers of colour, and examines how systemic disinvestment in comprehensive teacher preparation is narrowing diversity gains made over the past three decades.

10. Tara Kini | Learning Policy Institute

Tara Kini is Chief of Policy and Programs at the Learning Policy Institute, where she works nationally to bring high-quality research to policymakers and the public to advance evidence-based policies that support equitable learning. Her report Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness?, co-authored with Anne Podolsky, is one of the most cited analyses of why early career teacher attrition is so costly: it establishes that teachers continue to become more effective for at least the first decade of their career, meaning every departure in the first five years represents a compounding loss that the school and its students will never recover.

Kini also works on state-level teacher shortage data, including the LPI's annual state-by-state scan that tracks which positions remain unfilled or are filled by teachers without full certification. This data infrastructure is essential for identifying where the workforce crisis is most acute and where policy investment will have the greatest return.

11. Emma Garcia | Learning Policy Institute

Emma Garcia is a Senior Researcher at the Learning Policy Institute whose work focuses on the economics of teacher shortages, the cost of turnover, and the policy interventions that deliver the best return on investment. Her research has documented that the United States teacher shortage is driven primarily by high attrition rather than inadequate supply, and that addressing working conditions is more cost-effective than continually expanding recruitment pipelines into a profession that cannot retain the people it already trains.

Garcia co-authored the 2026 Teacher Turnover report with Tiffany Tan, Wesley Wei, and Desiree Carver-Thomas, and has contributed to multiple LPI analyses of how underresourced schools bear a disproportionate share of the turnover burden. Her work is particularly relevant for equity-focused school systems trying to understand why their most experienced teachers leave the schools that need them most.

12. Elizabeth Steiner | RAND Corporation

Elizabeth Steiner leads the State of the American Teacher survey at RAND Corporation, the largest and most comprehensive annual study of K-12 teacher wellbeing, pay, and intentions to stay in or leave the profession. The 2025 edition of this survey, co-authored with Phoebe Rose Levine, Sy Doan, and Ashley Woo, found that teachers were more likely than similar working adults to report poor wellbeing on every single measure tracked since 2021, including burnout, job-related stress, and inability to enjoy their private life.

Steiner's work is significant because it provides the most current nationally representative data on the teacher retention problem, updated annually. Its findings shape the national policy conversation, inform collective bargaining discussions, and provide the comparative data that helps school leaders understand how their own schools relate to national trends. The finding that 53 percent of teachers reported burnout in 2025, down from 60 percent in 2024, suggests the problem is improving but remains severe.

Practitioner Advocates and School Culture Voices

Some of the most influential voices on teacher retention are not researchers at all. They are practitioners, consultants, and advocates whose work focuses on translating evidence into practical school-level action. This group works at the interface between what research says and what school leaders can do on Monday morning.

13. Adam Voigt | Real Schools

Adam Voigt is the founder of Real Schools in Australia and one of the most distinctive voices in the global conversation about what school cultures that retain teachers actually feel and look like in practice. A former teacher and principal, Voigt's Real Schools model focuses on restorative practice, relational culture, and student-centred discipline as the foundations of schools where both students and staff want to be. His work is grounded in the insight that teacher retention and student engagement are not separate problems: they are symptoms of the same underlying cultural conditions.

Voigt is active on LinkedIn and a regular keynote speaker at education conferences across Australia and internationally. His practical, non-ideological approach to culture change makes his work accessible to school leaders who are sceptical of abstract theory. Real Schools has worked with hundreds of schools across Australia, and Voigt's writing and speaking consistently ground the retention conversation in the specific, observable leadership behaviours that create or destroy a sense of belonging for teaching staff.

14. Daniela Falecki | Teacher Wellbeing

Daniela Falecki is an Australian teacher wellbeing specialist whose work directly addresses the systemic conditions that drive teacher burnout and disengagement. Based in Australia with a growing international profile, Falecki is the founder of Teacher Wellbeing, an organisation focused on staff sustainability, retention, trust, and systemic wellbeing work that addresses the root causes of teacher attrition rather than offering surface-level self-care advice. Her core argument is that teacher wellbeing is not about yoga in the staffroom but about trust, communication, workload, autonomy, and the systemic conditions that school leaders can directly influence.

Falecki is highly active on LinkedIn and a recognised voice in the Australian education wellbeing community. Her practical, evidence-informed approach to wellbeing speaks directly to school leaders who understand that the structural causes of teacher attrition require structural solutions, and who are looking for practical guidance on how to create those conditions in their own schools.

15. Barnett Berry | Center for Teaching Quality

Barnett Berry is the founder and CEO of the Center for Teaching Quality, a US-based organisation that places teacher voice at the centre of education reform. Berry's foundational insight, developed over decades of research and advocacy, is that education reform fails when it is designed without the participation of the teachers who must implement it. His work has been particularly important in documenting how the absence of teacher voice in policy and school decision-making drives the disengagement and eventual departure of talented educators.

Berry's book Teaching 2030: What We Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools, Now and in the Future, co-authored with a group of teaching experts, laid out a vision for a teaching profession transformed by teacher leadership and professional autonomy. His current work through CTQ focuses on building networks of teacher leaders who shape policy from within the profession, providing the participatory mechanisms that retention research consistently identifies as essential.

16. Simon Breakspear | Learning Sprints

Simon Breakspear is the founder of Learning Sprints, an Australian education consultancy whose approach to school improvement focuses on short, evidence-based cycles of professional learning that improve instructional quality and teacher professional agency simultaneously. Based in Australia with a significant international practice, Breakspear is active on LinkedIn and a frequent keynote speaker at education conferences globally. His work directly addresses one of the strongest retention levers: giving teachers regular, meaningful opportunities to grow professionally in the context of their own classrooms and schools.

Breakspear's research on adaptive leadership in education, developed during his doctoral work at Cambridge, informs his practical work with schools navigating rapid change. His approach treats teacher professional development not as a compliance exercise but as the primary mechanism through which schools improve and retain their best people simultaneously.

17. Dan Haesler | Komo

Dan Haesler is the co-founder of Komo, an Australian organisation focused on employee and student wellbeing data, and a widely recognised voice on teacher wellbeing, purpose, and motivation. He is active on LinkedIn and a popular keynote speaker at education conferences in Australia and New Zealand. Haesler's work examines why teachers stay engaged in the profession and what school leaders can do to create the conditions for sustained motivation rather than merely preventing burnout.

His approach is grounded in self-determination theory, the research framework that identifies autonomy, competence, and relatedness as the three fundamental drivers of human motivation, and applies it directly to the specific context of teaching. Haesler's insight that the conditions that keep teachers engaged are the same conditions that drive student learning creates a coherent case for why investing in teacher wellbeing is not a distraction from the school's core mission but an expression of it.

International and Policy Voices

Teacher retention is not a problem unique to any one country, and some of the most important voices on this topic operate at a global or international policy level, shaping how systems think about the challenge across borders and cultural contexts.

18. Pasi Sahlberg | University of Melbourne

Pasi Sahlberg is a Finnish educator, author, and scholar based at the University of Melbourne whose work on the Finnish education system has become one of the most globally influential arguments for teacher trust and autonomy as retention strategies. His book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland won the 2013 Grawemeyer Award and has shaped education reform conversations in dozens of countries. His more recent book In Teachers We Trust: The Finnish Way to World-Class Schools, co-authored with Timothy Walker, extends this argument explicitly to the culture of trust that the Finnish system embeds in how teachers are treated.

Sahlberg's core insight, grounded in Finland's internationally admired approach, is that the countries that retain teachers most effectively are those that trust teachers to make professional decisions without the surveillance, inspection, and micromanagement that undermine professional identity in lower-performing systems. He is active on LinkedIn and a frequent keynote speaker at education conferences globally, bringing a non-Anglophone perspective that usefully challenges assumptions built into the US and UK-dominated research base.

19. Mugwena Maluleke | Education International

Mugwena Maluleke is the President of Education International, a global federation of education unions and associations representing more than 32 million teachers and education workers in 178 countries and territories. His advocacy provides the global labour perspective on teacher retention, focusing on the structural conditions, fair compensation, safe working environments, and professional respect, that determine whether teaching remains an attractive and sustainable career across different national contexts.

Maluleke was elected at Education International's 10th World Congress in Buenos Aires in August 2024, bringing decades of experience as General Secretary of the South African Democratic Teachers Union. He has argued publicly that the data is clear that funding the teaching profession is essential to elevating its status and addressing both recruitment and retention. His voice represents the collective power of the world's teachers and the institutional perspective that macro policy change requires.

20. Carlos Vargas Tamez | UNESCO

Carlos Vargas Tamez is the Chief of UNESCO's Section for Teacher Development, where he leads the organisation's global work on teacher policy, professional development, and workforce sustainability. His work provides the cross-national perspective on teacher retention, drawing on UNESCO's data from education systems across six continents to identify patterns, levers, and persistent gaps in how countries invest in and support their teaching workforce.

In widely cited commentary on global teacher retention trends, Vargas Tamez has argued that the biggest misconception about teacher attrition is that it reflects a lack of capacity or commitment on the part of teachers, when in fact it most often reflects a structural lack of trust and professional autonomy. His insight that the education systems that successfully retain teachers are those that trust them to make professional decisions directly mirrors the research produced by Ingersoll and the Finnish evidence documented by Sahlberg.

21. Leila Khoury-Nolde | Education International

Leila Khoury-Nolde is a researcher and policy specialist at Education International whose work focuses on the global dimensions of teacher workforce policy, including retention, professional status, and the working conditions that determine whether teaching remains a desirable career across diverse national contexts. Her research synthesises evidence from Education International's network of member organisations to build a cross-national picture of what conditions drive or undermine teacher retention globally.

Khoury-Nolde's work is particularly valuable for its inclusion of perspectives from education systems outside the Anglophone research mainstream, including emerging economies and Global South contexts where the teacher shortage is most acute and where the conditions that drive attrition can differ significantly from those documented in US or UK-focused research.

22. Vikas Pota | T4 Education

Vikas Pota is the CEO of T4 Education, a global organisation that advocates for the recognition, support, and professional development of teachers worldwide. T4 Education runs the Global Teacher Prize and the World's Best School Prizes, which collectively celebrate exceptional teaching practice and the school cultures that support it. Pota is active on LinkedIn and a regular voice at global education policy forums. His work operates on the premise that the status of teaching as a profession, how teachers are perceived by society, by governments, and by the young people considering whether to enter the profession, is as important a retention driver as pay or working conditions.

Pota's global platform allows him to bring together evidence and examples from education systems as different as Kenya, Finland, and India, building a cross-cultural case for what investments in teacher status and recognition look like and what outcomes they produce. His advocacy has put teacher recognition and professional dignity at the centre of the global education policy conversation.

23. Andreas Schleicher | OECD

Andreas Schleicher is the Director for Education and Skills at the OECD and the architect of PISA, the international assessment programme that produces much of the comparative data that shapes global education policy. The OECD's Teaching and Learning International Survey, which Schleicher oversees, is one of the most comprehensive international sources of data on teacher job satisfaction, working conditions, and intentions to leave the profession. Its findings consistently show that teacher voice, professional autonomy, and collaborative working time are among the strongest predictors of retention across national contexts.

Schleicher's influence on the teacher retention conversation derives largely from his ability to frame national data within a global comparative context, allowing policymakers to see how their system's retention challenges compare to those of high-performing systems and what structural differences explain the gap. His synthesis of TALIS and PISA data has made the OECD's work essential context for any serious engagement with the global dimensions of teacher workforce challenges.

Equity and Diversity Voices

Some of the most urgent and underreported dimensions of teacher retention involve equity: the disproportionate attrition of teachers of colour from a profession that urgently needs them, and the specific conditions in underresourced schools that drive out experienced educators at double the rate of well-resourced ones. This group focuses specifically on these dynamics.

24. Sharif El-Mekki | Center for Black Educator Development

Sharif El-Mekki is the founder and CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development, which works to ensure that Black children have access to Black teachers by building, supporting, and retaining the pipeline of Black educators in the United States. El-Mekki's work addresses one of the most significant and underreported dimensions of teacher retention: the specific barriers that drive Black teachers out of the profession at higher rates than their peers, including school cultures that fail to value their perspective, administrative structures that marginalise their leadership, and assignment patterns that place them disproportionately in the most under-resourced schools.

He is the author of multiple influential pieces on why Black teachers matter for Black students, drawing on research showing that Black students taught by Black teachers have significantly higher academic achievement and lower suspension rates. His LinkedIn activity is consistent and substantive, regularly connecting research evidence to lived practitioner experience in ways that make his commentary genuinely distinctive.

25. Cynthia Haynes | Center for Black Educator Development

Cynthia Haynes leads programmes and partnerships at the Center for Black Educator Development, where she works directly on the systems, supports, and school conditions that help Black educators build long, sustainable careers in the profession. Her work focuses on the practical organisational mechanisms by which schools can move from rhetoric about diversity to creating the conditions that actually retain diverse educators over time.

Haynes' contribution to the retention conversation sits at the intersection of professional development, mentoring, and cultural competency in school leadership. Her work provides actionable guidance for school leaders who understand the equity case for diverse staffing but struggle to translate that understanding into the specific practices that determine whether diverse educators feel genuinely valued and supported.

26. Margarita Bianco | University of Colorado Denver

Margarita Bianco is a Professor at the University of Colorado Denver and the founder of the Pathways2Teaching programme, one of the most recognised and replicated grow-your-own teacher pipeline models in the United States. Her work focuses on recruiting students of colour from the communities schools serve and supporting them through teacher preparation and into the profession, building the diversity pipeline from within the school community itself.

Grow-your-own programmes are increasingly recognised as among the most retention-effective teacher pipeline strategies because they recruit from within communities that have strong relational ties to the schools they will eventually serve. Bianco's research and practice on the design and implementation of these programmes provides essential guidance for districts and school systems trying to simultaneously solve the diversity and retention challenges they face.

27. Leslie Fenwick | Howard University

Leslie Fenwick is a Professor at Howard University's School of Education and a prominent voice on teacher preparation, diversity, and the systemic conditions that determine whether teachers of colour can build sustainable careers in the profession. Her scholarship examines the relationship between teacher education quality, teacher diversity, and the broader policy environment that shapes who enters, stays in, and leaves the teaching profession.

Fenwick has been particularly critical of alternative certification pathways that reduce preparation requirements in ways that disproportionately affect diverse teacher candidates and correlate with higher attrition rates. Her work connects the workforce diversity conversation to the teacher preparation quality conversation, arguing that the two cannot be separated: shortcuts that make the profession more accessible in the short term frequently make it less sustainable over a career.

28. Jose Vilson | EduColor

Jose Vilson is a math teacher, activist, and author based in New York City who co-founded EduColor, an organisation that centres race and equity in education reform conversations. His book This Is Not a Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education is one of the most widely read teacher perspectives on the conditions that drive educators of colour out of urban schools. Vilson's work provides a practitioner perspective on retention that is grounded in the specific daily realities of teaching in high-need urban schools, rather than the bird's-eye view of academic research.

His ongoing work on teacher voice, cultural competency in school leadership, and the systemic conditions that make urban schools unsustainable workplaces for many of their most culturally connected teachers makes him one of the most important practitioner voices in the equity-and-retention conversation. He is active on LinkedIn and a frequent speaker and writer on these themes.

29. Kwame Sarfo-Mensah | Identity Talk Consulting

Kwame Sarfo-Mensah is the founder of Identity Talk Consulting and the author of Transformative Teaching and Identity Affirming Practices in Urban Education. His work focuses on the intersection of teacher identity, cultural competency, and the conditions that make teaching in urban and diverse school communities sustainable over a career. Sarfo-Mensah's insight is that retention in diverse school communities requires not just adequate compensation and workload management but genuine affirmation of the cultural knowledge and identities that diverse teachers bring to the profession.

His LinkedIn activity centres on practical guidance for teachers and school leaders navigating the specific challenges of culturally responsive, identity-affirming practice in contexts where that work is often undervalued or actively undermined by standardised accountability regimes. His voice is an important counterpoint to the dominant research frameworks that focus primarily on systemic conditions without attending to the cultural dimensions of teacher identity and belonging.

30. Lorena German | author / teacher advocate

Lorena German is an author, educator, and equity advocate whose work focuses on the conditions that make teaching a sustainable, fulfilling profession for educators from marginalised communities. Her book Textured Teaching: A Framework for Culturally Sustaining Practice is widely used in teacher preparation programmes and professional development contexts. German's advocacy consistently connects the cultural conditions of schools, how teachers are treated, whose knowledge is valued, who holds power, to the retention dynamics that drive out educators whose professional identity is not affirmed by the institutions they work within.

She is active on LinkedIn, connecting her work on curriculum, culture, and equity directly to the leadership conditions that determine whether schools become places where diverse educators choose to build long careers or places they leave as soon as a better option presents itself.

UK and European Voices

The United Kingdom, alongside the United States, has produced some of the most rigorous and publicly visible research and advocacy on teacher retention. This group represents the distinctive perspectives that the UK and European context brings to a global conversation.

31. Sam Sims | UCL Institute of Education

Sam Sims is a researcher at the UCL Institute of Education whose work on teacher recruitment, retention, and working conditions has directly influenced UK government policy on workload, professional development, and teacher wellbeing. His research examines how specific aspects of school organisational climate, including collaborative working time, administrative workload, and the quality of professional development, are associated with teacher stress and retention. His work for the Teacher Development Trust found that time spent on professional development and collaborative working is associated with lower work-related stress, providing a direct evidence base for investment in professional learning as a retention strategy.

Sims's combination of quantitative rigour and policy relevance makes him one of the most influential UK voices in the field. His research has been taken up by the Education Endowment Foundation and the Department for Education, giving it a direct pathway into national policy.

32. David Weston | Teacher Development Trust

David Weston is the CEO of the Teacher Development Trust, the UK's independent charity dedicated to research-informed professional development for teachers. His work documents the relationship between high-quality professional development and teacher retention, arguing that schools investing in the professional growth of their staff see retention benefits that go well beyond the direct impact of training on instructional quality. The TDT's research on working conditions and teacher development provides school leaders with a practical evidence base for the investment decisions that determine whether their school becomes a professional home or a stepping stone.

Weston is active on LinkedIn and a regular contributor to UK education policy conversations. His practical, research-grounded approach to professional development as a retention tool makes him one of the most useful voices for school leaders looking for actionable guidance rather than abstract theory.

33. Alison Peacock | Chartered College of Teaching

Alison Peacock is the CEO of the Chartered College of Teaching, the UK's professional body for teachers, and one of the most prominent advocates for teacher professional status and autonomy. Her work focuses on establishing teaching as a fully chartered profession with the knowledge, identity, and voice that professional status confers, arguing that this transformation is essential to making the profession genuinely attractive and retainable over a career.

Peacock's contribution to the retention conversation operates at the level of professional identity and culture: she advocates for the conditions under which teachers experience themselves as trusted, knowledgeable professionals rather than deliverers of someone else's curriculum. Her work through the Chartered College directly supports the professional learning and research engagement that build teacher commitment and reduce attrition.

34. Leora Cruddas | Confederation of School Trusts

Leora Cruddas is the CEO of the Confederation of School Trusts, the national body for multi-academy trusts in England, which represents a significant and growing proportion of English secondary schools. Her work on trust leadership, school culture, and the conditions that make schools sustainable workplaces for staff gives her a distinctive vantage point on retention at the system level. CST's research and advocacy on workload, governance, and staff wellbeing directly influences how school trusts across England think about their responsibilities to their teaching workforce.

Cruddas's voice bridges the gap between governance and culture, connecting the structural decisions that school trusts make about workload, deployment, and professional development to the retention outcomes that follow. Her work is essential reading for school leaders in England navigating the specific governance context of the multi-academy trust model.

35. Paul Whiteman | NAHT

Paul Whiteman is the General Secretary of NAHT, the principal union and professional association for headteachers and senior school leaders in England, and one of the most prominent advocacy voices on teacher and school leader working conditions in the UK. His focus includes teacher workload, inspection reform, and the leadership conditions that determine whether schools can retain both their teaching staff and their school leaders. NAHT's research and advocacy on sustainable leadership conditions provides a practitioner-grounded counterpoint to policy decisions that increase workload without corresponding investment in support.

Whiteman's ongoing commentary on the specific systemic pressures that drive school staff attrition makes him an important voice for school leaders in England who are navigating the policy environment while trying to build stable, committed teams.

36. Daniel Kebede | National Education Union

Daniel Kebede is the General Secretary of the National Education Union, the largest education union in Europe, representing approximately 450,000 teachers, support staff, and education professionals. His focus on teacher pay, workload, recruitment and retention, and equity makes the NEU a powerful institutional voice in national education policy. Kebede has been particularly active in arguing that the teacher retention crisis in England is directly connected to the erosion of real-terms pay over the past decade and the chronic underinvestment in the working conditions that research consistently identifies as retention-critical.

His voice represents not just individual perspective but collective institutional power: the NEU's research and advocacy directly shapes the terms of political debate about teacher workforce investment in the United Kingdom, and Kebede's public communications translate complex workforce dynamics into arguments accessible to parents, politicians, and the broader public.

37. Sam Freedman | Policy and Research UK

Sam Freedman is a former senior adviser to the Secretary of State for Education in England and one of the most credible and well-connected independent commentators on education policy and teacher workforce issues in the UK. His work bridges the gap between research evidence and political reality, drawing on his deep familiarity with how policy is actually made and why it often fails to translate into the working condition improvements that retention research recommends. His writing on teacher workforce policy is consistently substantive and widely read.

Freedman's insider knowledge of the policy process makes his commentary particularly valuable: he explains not just what the evidence says but why systems structured the way they are find it so difficult to act on it, providing a systems-level analysis that is rare in the retention conversation.

38. Lee Elliot Major | University of Exeter

Lee Elliot Major is a Professor of Social Mobility at the University of Exeter and former CEO of the Sutton Trust, the UK's leading charity focused on social mobility and educational opportunity. His work examines the relationship between teacher quality, teacher distribution, and educational equity, arguing that the schools serving the most disadvantaged students are disproportionately staffed by the least experienced and least stable teaching workforce. His research on how retention inequities compound educational disadvantage provides the equity argument for targeted investment in retention in high-need schools.

Major is active on LinkedIn and a regular commentator on the UK education policy debate. His ability to connect workforce data to outcomes for the most disadvantaged students makes his advocacy particularly persuasive in policy contexts where social mobility is a stated government priority.

39. Karen Edge | UCL

Karen Edge is a Professor of Educational Leadership at UCL's Institute of Education whose research focuses on urban school leadership, teacher leadership, and the conditions that sustain both school leaders and teachers across careers. Her global comparative work on educational leadership in cities such as London, New York, and Hong Kong provides a cross-national perspective on the specific challenges that urban school contexts create for teacher retention and leadership sustainability.

Edge's work is distinctive for its attention to the relational and emotional dimensions of school leadership, examining how school leaders build the cultures of trust and professional belonging that research consistently identifies as retention-critical. Her networks and collaborations span multiple continents, giving her a genuinely global rather than nationally bounded perspective on the leadership conditions that retain teachers.

40. Beng Huat See | University of Birmingham

Beng Huat See is a Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Birmingham whose current research is focused specifically on teacher supply, teacher wellbeing, and professional development of teachers and school leaders. She leads an ESRC-funded project examining teacher education policies across OECD and partner countries to identify the political, cultural, institutional, and economic drivers of teacher supply. Her 2024 to 2025 literature review on leadership for teacher retention, covering 355 research outputs, is one of the most comprehensive systematic analyses of the evidence base on teacher autonomy, development, and voice as retention levers.

See's work provides the rigorous international evidence synthesis that policymakers and school systems need when evaluating the evidence base for specific retention interventions, and her focus on teacher education policies across diverse national contexts gives her analysis a breadth that single-country studies cannot match.

Australian and New Zealand Voices

Australia and New Zealand face some of the most acute teacher retention challenges in the developed world, with Australia's public schools reporting that more than 50 percent of school leaders are considering leaving the profession and New Zealand facing a projected secondary teacher shortfall. This group represents the distinctive perspectives and practical wisdom of Australasian researchers and practitioners.

41. Jenny Donovan | AERO

Jenny Donovan is the CEO of the Australian Education Research Organisation, the independent organisation responsible for ensuring that education decisions in Australia are informed by robust evidence. Her work focuses on translating research evidence into practice guidance for Australian schools and systems, including on the working conditions and professional development practices most strongly associated with teacher retention. AERO's 2025 and 2026 publications have directly addressed the conditions in Australian schools that are driving accelerating teacher attrition.

Donovan is active on LinkedIn and a regular presence at Australian education policy forums. Her ability to translate complex research into accessible guidance for school leaders makes her one of the most practically useful voices in the Australian retention conversation.

42. Fiona Longmuir | Monash University

Fiona Longmuir is a researcher at Monash University whose work focuses specifically on educational leadership, teacher retention, and student voice in the Australian state school sector. Her research on why teachers stay or leave, and on how student perspectives can inform school improvement, represents the kind of practitioner-relevant research that connects directly to the decisions school leaders make about culture, voice, and professional working conditions.

Longmuir's focus on what keeps teachers in the profession, rather than merely what drives them out, is a valuable reframing that points toward the affirmative cultural conditions that school leaders can build rather than simply the problems to be avoided. Her work is grounded in the specific context of Australian public schooling, making it particularly relevant for Australian school leaders navigating a workforce crisis that is playing out in their staffrooms every year.

43. Bronwyn Hinz | Grattan Institute

Bronwyn Hinz is a researcher at the Grattan Institute whose work examines teacher workforce policy in Australia, including the specific conditions that drive attrition in the Australian system and the policy interventions that have the strongest evidence for improving retention. The Grattan Institute is Australia's most prominent independent public policy think tank, and its education research regularly shapes national policy conversations on teacher workforce challenges.

Hinz's work provides the quantitative policy analysis that Australian system leaders and policymakers need when designing investment decisions about teacher preparation, professional development, and working conditions. Her research connects Australian teacher workforce data to international comparisons, helping place the Australian challenge in global context while identifying the specific local levers that are most promising.

44. Aaron Wilson | University of Auckland

Aaron Wilson is a researcher at the University of Auckland whose work focuses on literacy, teacher supply, and curriculum implementation in New Zealand's state schools. His research connects the specific conditions of the New Zealand education context to the broader global conversation about teacher retention, providing a Pacific perspective that is often absent from the US and UK-dominated research mainstream. His work on literacy instruction and the conditions that support effective teaching practice addresses the professional competence dimension of retention: teachers who feel equipped and effective are more likely to stay.

Wilson is active on LinkedIn and noted as one of the most valuable voices for New Zealand school leaders who are navigating a secondary teacher shortfall that is projected to worsen significantly over the coming decade.

Voices on Teacher Induction and Early Career Support

A significant proportion of all teacher attrition occurs in the first five years of teaching. This group focuses specifically on the induction, mentoring, and early career support systems that determine whether new teachers build the professional competence and social belonging they need to stay.

45. Henry Tran | University of South Carolina

Henry Tran is an Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina whose research focuses on human capital management in education, including teacher recruitment, retention, and the HR practices that school and district leaders use to build stable workforces. His work provides a management perspective on teacher retention that bridges the gap between academic research and the operational realities of district HR departments. He has written extensively on how leadership support, recognition, and career pathway clarity directly affect teacher retention decisions.

Tran is active on LinkedIn and a frequent contributor to education policy conversations that examine retention as an organisational and managerial challenge. His work is particularly useful for district-level leaders who are thinking about retention systemically rather than school by school.

46. Elizabeth Bettini | Boston University

Elizabeth Bettini is an Associate Professor at Boston University's Wheelock College of Education and Human Development whose research focuses on the retention of special education teachers, one of the most acute and underreported workforce crises in schools globally. Her work documents the specific conditions that drive special education teachers out of the profession at higher rates than general education teachers, including exceptional administrative burdens, isolation from colleagues, and the emotional demands of serving students with complex needs without adequate support.

Bettini's research has found that improving working conditions for special education teachers, particularly reducing paperwork burdens, increasing collaborative time, and ensuring adequate administrative support, improves retention significantly. This evidence is particularly important because special education teacher shortages are both more severe and more consequential for student outcomes than general education shortages, and yet they receive less policy attention.

47. John Papay | Brown University

John Papay is a Professor of Education and Economics at Brown University whose research examines how school working environments affect teacher development and retention over a career. His work with Matthew Kraft on supportive professional environments and teacher development is one of the most cited analyses of how the quality of the school workplace affects teacher effectiveness over time, establishing that the same conditions that retain teachers are also the conditions that make them more effective. This dual finding, that retention and quality are complements rather than trade-offs, is one of the most important and underappreciated results in the teacher workforce literature.

Papay's work provides the economic logic for investment in teacher professional environments, demonstrating that schools and districts that improve working conditions see gains in both retention and instructional quality simultaneously, making the investment case compelling even for leaders who think primarily about student outcomes rather than workforce sustainability.

48. Jing Liu | University of Maryland

Jing Liu is a researcher at the University of Maryland whose work focuses on the teacher labour market, teacher shortages, and the specific conditions in high-need schools that drive attrition. Her research examines how teacher deployment patterns, school assignments, and resource allocation across districts create systematic inequities in who has access to experienced, stable teaching staff. Her work provides rigorous quantitative analysis of the workforce dynamics that produce the most harmful concentration of teacher turnover in the schools serving the most disadvantaged students.

Liu is active in the academic teacher workforce research community and her work contributes to the growing body of evidence that teacher retention disparities across schools are not accidental but are driven by predictable structural conditions that policy can address.

Researchers on Working Conditions and Professional Development

49. Stephanie Hirsh | Learning Forward

Stephanie Hirsh is the former Executive Director of Learning Forward, the international association of professional learning that sets the standards for what high-quality professional development for teachers looks like. She served in this role for many years and led Learning Forward's work on establishing the research-based standards for professional learning that are now widely used across education systems globally. Her work directly addresses the professional development dimension of teacher retention, arguing that teachers who have access to high-quality, ongoing professional learning are more likely to experience the growth and efficacy that sustain a long career in the profession.

Hirsh's contribution to the retention conversation is grounded in the insight that teachers do not stay in the profession simply because they are paid fairly or not overloaded. They stay when they feel they are growing as professionals and doing work that matters. Sustained, high-quality professional development is one of the few retention levers that improves both working conditions and instructional quality simultaneously.

50. Carol Campbell | OISE, University of Toronto

Carol Campbell is a Professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto whose work focuses on teacher professional learning, education system change, and the policy conditions that support sustainable improvement in school quality. Her research in the Canadian and international context examines how professional learning communities, collaborative working time, and evidence-informed practice contribute both to teacher professional development and to the sense of professional belonging and purpose that drives retention.

Campbell's work on Ontario's education system, widely regarded as a model for English-speaking countries trying to improve quality at scale, includes analysis of how systemic investment in teacher professional development contributed to both improved student outcomes and improved workforce stability. Her comparative work across national contexts provides essential perspective for education systems trying to learn from high-retention models abroad rather than simply managing decline at home.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several voices came very close to making this list. Brene Brown, Adam Grant, and Simon Sinek have each contributed ideas about trust, psychological safety, and motivation that are relevant to the teacher retention conversation. Their work has shaped how school leaders think about culture and belonging. We deliberately moved past these household names to surface fresher voices who speak more specifically to the education context and whose research or practice is most directly focused on the teacher workforce.

Others seriously considered include Randi Weingarten at the American Federation of Teachers, whose national profile is significant but whose platform is primarily broadcast rather than research-engaged; Pedro Noguera at UCLA, whose equity work is foundational but whose most specific teacher retention contributions have been eclipsed by more current researchers; and Michael Fullan at OISE, whose organisational change framework is broadly relevant but whose most recent work has moved away from the specific teacher workforce challenge.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Engaging with Teacher Retention Research

The first mistake is treating teacher retention as primarily a compensation problem. Research consistently shows that while competitive pay is necessary, it is rarely sufficient, and that working conditions, professional autonomy, and organisational culture have at least as much predictive power for retention as salary. Schools and systems that invest only in pay without addressing the underlying conditions are solving a fraction of the problem.

The second mistake is looking for a single intervention. Teacher retention is a systems problem. The evidence base, as synthesised by researchers like Ingersoll, Kraft, and the Learning Policy Institute team, points to a constellation of mutually reinforcing conditions: preparation quality, induction support, professional development access, workload manageability, leadership quality, professional voice, and compensation. Intervening on one variable while leaving others unchanged produces marginal results.

The third mistake is treating teacher retention and student outcomes as separate problems. The evidence is clear that they are not. High turnover reduces student achievement across an entire school, not just in the classrooms of teachers who leave. And the interventions most effective for retention, improving school culture, professional development access, and leadership quality, are the same interventions most effective for improving instructional quality. They are the same problem.

The fourth mistake is applying solutions designed for well-resourced suburban schools to high-need urban or rural schools, where the drivers of attrition can be significantly different. Researchers like El-Mekki, Bettini, Liu, and Carver-Thomas have documented the specific conditions in high-need schools that require targeted rather than generic solutions.

The fifth mistake is ignoring the evidence on early career retention. More than 40 percent of new teachers leave the profession within five years. The most effective interventions, quality preparation, comprehensive induction, skilled mentoring, and early career professional development, are known and well-evidenced. The problem is not a lack of knowledge about what works but a persistent failure to invest in implementing it at scale.

Implementation Guide

Building a reading and following list from this directory is the first step, but the goal is to connect what these voices say to decisions you make on Monday morning. Start by identifying which category of the retention challenge is most acute in your school: early career attrition, mid-career departure, special education staffing, or equitable distribution across school communities. Then identify the three or four voices on this list whose work most directly addresses that specific challenge and follow them on LinkedIn.

For early career attrition, start with Richard Ingersoll and Elizabeth Bettini for the research base, then move to Henry Tran and Barnett Berry for the practitioner and policy translation. For school culture and working conditions, Daniela Falecki, Adam Voigt, and David Weston represent the practitioner wing, while Matthew Kraft and John Papay provide the research underpinning.

For equity-focused retention challenges, Sharif El-Mekki, Desiree Carver-Thomas, Jose Vilson, and Margarita Bianco are essential. For the global and comparative perspective, Pasi Sahlberg, Mugwena Maluleke, and Andreas Schleicher provide the cross-national frame that allows you to locate your school's challenges within a global pattern.

Engage with what you read rather than simply consuming it. The LinkedIn posts of these voices are most valuable when they prompt you to think about a specific decision your school is facing. A research finding about working conditions is only useful if it changes how you think about a staffing decision, a workload policy, or a professional development investment. Reading without acting is the retention research equivalent of knowing the research on exercise and still not going to the gym.

Jonno White works with school leadership teams to translate the insights these thinkers champion into the conversations, team dynamics, and culture decisions that determine whether your school becomes a place people choose to stay. To explore how Jonno's keynotes, workshops, and executive offsite facilitation might support your team, email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is often far more affordable than schools expect.

Frequently Asked Questions

How was this list compiled?

This list was compiled with reference to formal credentials in teacher retention research and practice, geographic and disciplinary diversity, genuine impact on how the field has evolved, and the quality and recency of each person's contribution to the conversation in 2025 to 2026. The list deliberately prioritises voices the reader may not yet have encountered alongside those whose work is foundational. No single country or institution represents more than half the list. The range of professional contexts spans academic research, policy advocacy, teacher unions, school leadership, and independent practice.

Why do teachers leave the profession?

Research consistently identifies a cluster of structural conditions that drive teacher attrition: inadequate compensation relative to comparable professions, excessive administrative workload, loss of professional autonomy, inadequate induction and mentoring support in the early career, poor school leadership, and the specific challenges of high-need school contexts. Doris Santoro's research adds another important dimension: some teachers leave not from burnout but from demoralization, the erosion of the moral meaning of the work through conditions that prevent them from teaching in ways they believe are right for students.

What is the global scale of the teacher shortage?

UNESCO estimates that addressing the worldwide teacher shortage requires approximately $120 billion annually in additional salary investment over the next five years. In the United States, approximately 1 in 7 public school teachers changes schools or leaves the profession every year, a rate higher than in the 1990s and higher than in leading international education systems. In Australia, more than 50 percent of school leaders report considering leaving the profession. New Zealand faces a projected secondary teacher shortfall of significant proportions. The shortage is not confined to any single nation or system.

Does paying teachers more fix teacher retention?

Competitive compensation is a necessary but insufficient condition for teacher retention. Research consistently shows that pay matters, particularly when teaching salaries are significantly below comparable professional roles, but working conditions, professional autonomy, school culture, and leadership quality have at least as much predictive power. Richard Ingersoll's foundational research identified poor management and inadequate support as primary drivers of early departure, and subsequent research has consistently confirmed that schools can increase pay without solving the retention problem if the underlying working conditions remain poor.

Can I hire someone to facilitate teacher retention workshops or culture sessions for my leadership team?

Yes. Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out with over 10,000 copies sold globally, who works with school leadership teams on the team dynamics, communication, and culture foundations that teacher retention depends on. While the researchers on this list generate the evidence, Jonno provides the facilitation and practical implementation support that helps school leadership teams put it into practice. To discuss how Jonno might work with your team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

What are the most important things a school principal can do to improve teacher retention?

The research points to five high-impact leadership practices. First, protect teacher planning and preparation time as a non-negotiable rather than a resource to be borrowed in emergencies. Second, create genuine and consequential channels for teacher voice in decisions that affect their work. Third, invest in high-quality, ongoing professional development that supports growth rather than compliance. Fourth, build a school culture in which difficult conversations happen directly and early rather than festering until they become reasons to leave. Fifth, attend specifically to the induction experience of new teachers, recognising that the majority of attrition occurs in the first five years and is largely preventable.

Final Thoughts

The teacher retention crisis is solvable. The evidence is clear. The voices on this list have spent their careers documenting what works and advocating for the investments that would work. What stands between the evidence and the solution is not a lack of knowledge but a persistent failure, at system, district, and school level, to invest in the conditions that make teaching a career people choose to stay in.

For school leaders, the most important immediate action is to stop treating retention as a problem that happens to you and start treating it as a problem that is shaped by decisions you make every week. The working conditions, professional development access, and school culture that research consistently identifies as retention-critical are not external forces. They are the products of leadership choices, some small and daily, some structural and strategic.

The voices on this list are the best guides available for making better choices. Follow them, read them, and let their evidence challenge assumptions that have gone unexamined in your school. And when you are ready to translate what you learn from them into practical action with your team, Jonno White is the person to call.

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold globally), and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast with 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. He works with school leadership teams to build the communication, culture, and team alignment foundations that make retention possible. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Step Up or Step Out on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com.au/Step-Up-Out-Difficult-Conflict/dp/B097X7B5LD

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits across the UK, India, Australia, Canada, Mongolia, New Zealand, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, USA, Finland, Namibia, and more. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read: 50 Essential Thought Leaders in Independent Schooling

If you lead an independent school, the voices you listen to shape how you think, plan, and respond to pressure. The right influences can sharpen your strategy, validate your instincts, or introduce a framework you had never considered. Independent and private schooling is a global sector of extraordinary scale. ISC Research data from 2026 shows there are over 15,075 English medium international schools globally, educating approximately 7.7 million students, employing 730,000 staff, and generating $69.3 billion USD in annual fee income.

The most influential thought leaders in independent schooling globally include Debra P. Wilson at NAIS, Julie Robinson at the ISC, and Jane Larsson at CIS. Their influence comes from leading the associations that set standards, shape policy, and provide professional development for thousands of schools.

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-independent-schooling