European Journal of Teacher Education

ISSN: 0261-9768 (Print) 1469-5928 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/cete20

Is teacher attrition a poor estimate of the value of teacher

education? A Swedish case

Rickard Carlsson, Per Lindqvist & Ulla Karin Nordänger

To cite this article: Rickard Carlsson, Per Lindqvist & Ulla Karin Nordänger (2019) Is teacher
attrition a poor estimate of the value of teacher education? A Swedish case, European Journal
of Teacher Education, 42:2, 243-257, DOI: 10.1080/02619768.2019.1566315

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EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF TEACHER EDUCATION
2019, VOL. 42, NO. 2, 243–257
https://doi.org/10.1080/02619768.2019.1566315

ARTICLE

Is teacher attrition a poor estimate of the value of teacher

education? A Swedish case
a
Rickard Carlsson , Per Lindqvistb and Ulla Karin Nordängera
a
Department of educational science, Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden; bDepartment of psychology,
Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Far from all who complete teacher education end up working as Received 4 December 2017
teachers throughout their entire career. At first sight the value of Accepted 8 December 2018
teacher education, in terms of efficiency, seems to be a failure. In the KEYWORDS
present article we argue that teacher attrition, when defined as Teacher attrition; teacher
whether one is working as teacher or not, is a too blunt measure to education; teacher career
gauge whether teacher education has been valuable. With a unique
dataset, where we have detailed information on 87 Swedish teacher
graduates’ working life across 23 years, we can consider whether
activities and/or experiences point to an apparent use of teacher
education. In conclusion, we find that in order to get informative
estimates of its value it is important to consider it from different
perspectives and to consider attrition related to the total working
time spent in educational settings across a career rather than percen-
tage leaving teaching after a set of years

Introduction
The evident purpose of teacher education seems simple enough: to enable individuals
to work as competent and skilled teachers. Yet a common finding is that many of the
recently graduated teachers choose not to go into teaching at all (Luekens, Lyter, and
Fox 2004), or will postpone entering their teaching careers (Lindqvist, Nordänger, and
Carlsson 2014). Furthermore, some will take breaks for several years (a.a.) whereas others
will start working as teachers but leave the profession after only a few years (Cooper and
Alvarado 2006; Ingersoll 2003, 2007; Newberry and Allsop 2017). Hence, far from all who
complete teacher education end up working as teachers throughout their entire careers,
a fact that has caused a discussion and questioning of the quality and even the eligibility
of teacher education (DN 2006; Lindqvist and Nordänger 2018).
Reported attrition figures in the literature vary considerably, with an estimated 30–50%
five year attrition rate in the US (Ingersoll 2003), the UK (Cooper and Alvarado 2006), Norway
(Roness 2012), Australia (Gallant and Riley 2014) and Sweden (Swedish Government 2010),
but less than 5% in France, the Netherlands and Hong Kong (Cooper and Alvarado 2006; den
Brok, Wubbels, and van Tartwijk 2017). In the sense of producing teachers who steadfastly
remain in teaching until retirement age, teacher education appears unsuccessful in several
countries, including Sweden. At first sight the value of teacher education, in terms of

CONTACT Per Lindqvist [email protected] Department of psychology, Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden
© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
244 R. CARLSSON ET AL.

physical efficiency, i.e. ‘producing a specific outcome with a minimum amount or quantity of
waste’, seems to be a failure. In the present article we will, however, try to discuss the value
of teacher education from a different viewpoint, arguing that its value depends not only on
whether the prospective teachers remain in the teaching profession but also on what they
are occupied with while not working as teachers and how they have made use of their
teacher education. Teacher attrition, when defined as whether one is working as a teacher
or not, is too blunt a measure to gauge whether teacher education has been valuable.
A more nuanced way of estimating the value of teacher education may be to complement
the ‘pathogenic’ viewpoint, identifying attrition as a negative work outcome, with
a ‘salutogenic’ perspective (Antonovsky 1987; Yinon and Orland- Barak 2017), emphasizing
attrition as active career decisions among teachers with a strong sense of agency. To this
end, we will make use of a unique dataset (Lindqvist, Nordänger, and Carlsson 2014;
Lindqvist and Nordänger 2016) where we have detailed information about the careers of
87 Swedish teacher graduates for a time period of 23 years. For each teacher graduate, and
each year after graduation, we will consider whether their activities and/or experiences
point to an apparent use of teacher education, regardless of whether they remain in the
profession or not.

Literature review
There is nearly universal agreement that teachers matter to students’ growth and learning
and there is equally widespread recognition that students should be taught by qualified
teachers. At the same time there is a great deal of disagreement over the ‘character,
content and caliber of the education, preparation and credentials prospective candidates
ought to obtain’ (Ingersoll, Merill, and May 2014, 2) before being considered qualified to
teach. While some argue for rigorous education and restricted entry, others claim that
there is no solid empirical research documenting the value of existing entry requirements,
licensing or certifications (Ingersoll, Merill, and May 2014). This lack of consensus has
created a long-standing demand for empirical research to assess the value of different
types of teacher education, their relation to student outcomes (Hattie 2009; Kennedy, Ahn,
and Choi 2008) and also their relation to teacher retention (Ingersoll, Merill, and
May 2014). This field of inquiry is unusual on the cross-organizational arena. Empirical
research on the added value of practitioners having a particular education or certification
is scarce in almost all occupations and professions (Ingersoll 2004). What Ingersoll, Merill,
and May (2014) found was that the content and substance of preparation matter when it
comes to attrition. Graduates with more pedagogy in their education were far less likely to
leave teaching after the first year on the job. Other studies claim that attrition rates appear
much lower for teachers with teaching qualifications or proven competence in teaching
than for teachers without qualifications (den Brok, Wubbels, and van Tartwijk 2017) and
there is some evidence that poorly prepared teachers are more likely to leave the
profession shortly after completing education (Darling Hammond 2003). Reports from
the UK also indicate that teacher attrition is related to initial training routes and allocation
of teacher training (Allen et al. 2016). These findings might strengthen the idea of value in
a more comprehensive teacher education in relation to retention. But it does not tell us if
individuals who have left teaching in schools still make use of their teacher education. In
our longitudinal study we have a unique opportunity to study if this is the case.
 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF TEACHER EDUCATION 245

Analytical framework
In order to assess the value of teacher education, it is instructive to consider how it
relates to the respective interests of various parties. To this end, we have construed
three stylized levels – schools, individuals, and society – each of which may plausibly be
said to play a part in teacher attrition and the use of educational credentials. The
conceptualization of the three levels is based on the micro-meso-macro framework
often used in social science (Dopfer, Foster, and Potts 2004) and on the multi-level
perspective in organizational research postulating hierarchical relationships among
variables which apply on more than one or two levels (Rousseau 1985). To some extent,
the conceptualization also includes sociological, managerial and economical ways of
problematizing teacher attrition in recent research (Kelchtermans 2017).
By thus differentiating between interested parties on different levels, we consciously
accentuate ways in which teacher attrition may be problematic, while at the same time
allowing ourselves to specifically address the interests of each party and how they relate
to the empirical patterns we find.
Teachers who drop out of teaching in schools form one interested party category.
Whether their interests are conceived in terms of human capital formation or in terms of
more intangible aspects of human identity through life, there is a real possibility that the
leavers would experience discontent with the value of teacher training, if it turned out to
be a detour or a dead end. Hence the point of view of individuals should be taken into
account to ascertain whether this is the case. If we must gauge the interests and fate of
those who leave the schools, it is no less important to assess the situation of those who
stay on, and their immediate working environment is the school. An analysis of teacher
attrition should therefore address how it relates to the school level. Finally, there is
reason to include society at large as a level in play. Teacher attrition raises important
questions about educational economics. Just as in the case of pilots, engineers or PhDs,
it may appear wasteful for society to finance the education of future professionals if they
defect into other lines of work.
In order to connect the value of teacher education to teacher attrition in a nuanced
way we have also, inspired by Yinon and Orland- Barak (2017), adopted a salutogenic
perspective, which allows for identifying attrition not solely as a negative work outcome.
The salutogenic perspective contributes to perceiving attrition as career decisions
reflecting the meaning that teachers attach to their work. The perspective helps illumi-
nate the strengths of the leavers and their continuing commitment to their calling – to
make a difference in the lives of others – as a driving force in deciding to leave the
teaching profession.

The school level

From the school level perspective, the main issue is retaining a constant pool of trained
teachers. If teachers with professional degrees never enter or choose to leave the school
system, then the schools will have to resort to hiring people without these professional
degrees. Hence, from a school level perspective, it becomes a problem if 1 000 addi-
tional certified teachers are required, but only 500 of those who are certified end up
teaching in schools. Another problem comes from high turnover. It is hard for schools to
246 R. CARLSSON ET AL.

build a stable organization, and for teachers to maintain good collegial relationships, as
well as good relationships with students, if a considerable proportion of the work force
is constantly shifting (Newberry and Allsop 2017). Indeed, high turnover rates can result
in negative effects for both the students and the teachers who stayed behind (Ronfeld,
Loeb, and Wyckoff 2013). Yet these latter types of organizational and instructional
disruptions are poorly captured by the teacher attrition figure. Indeed, for a specific
school it is of little importance whether it loses a teacher to another type of job or to
another school, but for the school system as a whole this is of great importance.
Two types of teacher attrition may, in fact, be beneficial – even necessary – from
a school level perspective. The first type of inevitable and not necessarily harmful
attrition is the so called ”healthy” attrition (Ingersoll 2001) consisting of moderately
engaged, disappointed teachers who leave the job because it does not match their
sense of professional identity (Lindqvist and Nordänger 2016) or who simply do not
master it (Watt and Richardson 2008). The second type of necessary attrition is related to
recruitment of managerial positions in the school system. Schools require other profes-
sionals besides teachers, such as principals and project leaders. Teachers can be
recruited for these positions, but this will, of course, result in higher numbers of teacher
attrition. Low teacher attrition hence necessitates that people who lack teacher experi-
ence and teacher education fill such positions. In most cases experiences of teacher
education and teaching provide an educational capital that can be used successfully in
school management positions (Viggosson 2011). Lethwood, Harris, and Hopkins (2008)
states that one of the most important criteria for successful school leadership is having
a well-grounded sense of context. Having experience of teacher education and teaching
would definitely promote such sensibility for the context. Thus, to the extent that
teacher education and teaching experience are relevant for school management, low
teacher attrition can be problematic here as well.
To sum up, an attrition figure that solely focuses on whether one works as a teacher
or not, is rather uninformative for estimating the value of teacher education even from
a strict school perspective. Instead, the attrition figure should also reflect whether one
stays in the school system or not.

The societal level

From a societal perspective, the question is whether a professional degree yields returns
to society as a whole (Bergan and Damian 2010; Allen et al. 2016). Greatly simplified, this
question can be understood as whether the individual is able to do advanced work that
the individual would not have been able to do prior to the education. Hence, simply
noting that there are many people with teaching degrees who do not teach, there does
not seem to be a problem on this level. For example, these people may conduct
educational research that requires a teacher background or organize trainee programs
at a motor company. The only true loss from a societal perspective are those who end
up doing the same type of work as prior to their education, or those who end up in
some other type of work that does not make use of their professional education.
Importantly, whether a teacher education is valuable or not is not always apparently
revealed by the type of occupation held. A teacher may work with improving the
education among staff at a large motor company, making good use of his/her teacher
 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF TEACHER EDUCATION 247

training, but appearing as attrition if the figure is based on uninformed statistics. Hence,
detailed information from open surveys or interviews is typically necessary to reveal
work tasks with sufficient precision to be able to gauge whether individuals make use of
their education or not.

The individual level

It has been argued that there are inherent values for individuals with higher education in
terms of civic and cultural engagement, life satisfaction, general health (Becchetti, Solferino,
and Tessitore 2016; OECD 2017), not to mention development of general cognitive and
intellectual skills (Tam 2002). These qualities are inherently difficult to measure improve-
ments in, and perhaps more importantly, impossible to put a value on. Yet the idea is that
individuals will grow as a result of attending higher education. Answering this question
objectively is beyond the scope of present research. However, we will consider the gradu-
ates’ subjective beliefs regarding the meaningfulness of their teacher education during their
lives. From this perspective, it is not only a matter of obvious returns to society. For example,
three years of education that is highly self-fulfilling during and afterwards, may be mean-
ingful from the individual’s perspective, even if it is economically inefficient. In contrast,
a shorter two-year education that is more cost-efficient, but perceived as a necessary evil
rather than a self-improving activity, may not be as meaningful from the individual’s
perspective. Importantly, people who end up working in activities very far from teaching
may still subjectively feel that their education was meaningful to them in that it leads to
personal growth in some way. This could be a general aspect of any academic education, for
instance regarding improved critical thinking or language skills. Or it could be more or less
specific to teacher education, in cases of an increased understanding of people,
a pedagogical perspective or personal emotional development.
Individual perceptions of meaningfulness can be considered not only as individual
paybacks of higher education but also as benefits for other individuals in society.
Decisions to stay in or leave teaching are not always an answer to the question: What
is in it for me? It could just as well be an active choice to be able to make a difference for
other individuals in society.

Method
For more than 20 years (1993 – ongoing) we have been able to follow a group of 87
Swedish teachers. The first 15 years through semi-structured questionnaires, exchanged
between them and their former lecturer at teacher education. This was done annually
for the first five years, once after seven years, and once again after 15 years. After the
retirement of the former lecturer, we inherited the material and continued to gather
data once a year through more systematic questions in formal questionnaires. In total,
up until now (November 2017), we have gathered data on 14 occasions. From 2013 we
have also conducted follow-up interviews with key informants (N = 48).
The material is unusually informative, since the response rate is very high (see Table 1).
The respondents have, in most cases, continued to answer the surveys even though some
of them have left their jobs as teachers.
248 R. CARLSSON ET AL.

Table 1. Response rate across the years (%).

Year 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 2000 2008 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
Response rate 100 100 100 100 100 99 93 85 83 86 84 83 80

Even though the questionnaires were not systematically formulated during the first
15 years, the informants have, in all surveys, reported if they work as teachers, where
they work and what kind of work they do (including non-teaching work). In survey 1–4, 6
and 9–10 they have also described experiences of and expectations on their work as
teachers. In later questionnaires some retrospective information about their career
trajectories has been gathered.
With a mixed method approach we have had the possibility of combining particularity with
generality, to make quantitative and qualitative data”mutually illuminating” (Cohen, Manion,
and Morrison 2011, 24). The mixed approach of the study is sequential (Teddlie and Tashakkori
2006), in which qualitative and quantitative procedures run one after the other, in order to
sufficiently answer the research questions. In the first stage of the analysis, parts of the mainly
qualitative data have undergone basic qualitative analyses in order to be transposed into
quantitative variables. (Examples include: working as a teacher, in what subjects and grades,
movements in and between schools).
The present study makes use of one of these coded variables: occupation. For each year, an
individual’s occupation was coded as: teacher, management, education job, parental leave,
studying, other job, not working, or missing data. The granularity of this coding was chosen in
order to be able to provide as clear information as possible about the three levels (school,
societal, individual), while remaining abstract enough to still provide an overall, zoomed out
picture. All coding was based on the most dominant activity of the year (e.g. studying 25% and
teaching 75% was coded as teacher). Responses were coded as teacher if respondents were
teaching within the regular school system, and as education job if they were teaching outside
the regular school system (e.g. education of industrial staff). If their work was outside the
educational sector entirely, it was coded as other job. Studying included all types of studies and
we did not differentiate between studying to improve one’s teaching or some other subject.
However, looking at the trajectories, it is quite easy to see how, for a few individuals, the studies
led to a career change and a transition to other job. In not working the reason is not specified
and the category includes for example unemployment, sick leave and retirement. Missing data
was coded specifically for years where it was not possible to accurately code the current
occupational activity.
Having coded the variables in stage one, in stage two we illustrated the individual
trajectories by plotting quantitative data from the 87 participants into one figure, using the
TramineR package (Gabadinho et al. 2009, 2011) in R 3.2.2. TramineR is a specialized statistical
package for analyzing sequences of nominal (category) data, for example career trajectories
and can also be used to calculate a number of summary statistics from this type of data
material. Apart from the figure, we also relied on the ‘seqmeant’ command in TramineR to
calculate the average duration spent in each state. In other words, the average time spent
working as a teacher, studying, etc. The code and data material necessary to reproduce the
analysis in the TramineR package can be found at our Open Science Framework project page
link: https://osf.io/34xb7/?view_only=ee280aa0bdd14e6e8de9706c2220eb95.
 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF TEACHER EDUCATION 249

The data also allows further qualitative analyses. At the third stage we have had the
possibility of moving beyond figures and numbers and actually study how each indivi-
dual, on each occasion, describes his/her trajectory. In addition to the overall statistical
picture we can return to qualitative data for more detailed information.

Ethical considerations
The nature of the study requires some ethical considerations. Hence, no personal data
has been linked to data or results and participants have been given continuous informa-
tion on the conditions for participation in the study. All participants have been offered
opportunities to view research results from the study. Throughout the study, we have
carefully balanced the value of the expected knowledge contribution against any
negative consequences for those involved.

The cohort
The cohort graduated in December 1993, after 3.5 academic years at a university in
a small town in southeastern Sweden. A quarter of them stated that this was their
hometown already when they started teacher education and the majority had been
recruited from nearby areas. Only 15 of the 87 had moved long distances to become
teachers. This is in line with the recruitment of student teachers at other teacher training
programs at small colleges in Sweden. Nor do the students’ social backgrounds differ
significantly from comparable cohorts recruited to small colleges at this time (Bertilsson,
Börjesson, and Broady 2008).
Of the 87 participants 63 were women and 24 were men, a slightly higher number of
men than in comparable national statistics. In their last year of studies, they were
between 22 and 47 years old, with an average age of 24. These figures differ slightly
from national statistics at that time, showing an average age of 27 for beginner teacher
students. To sum up, the cohort can be seen as fairly representative of students in
teacher education in Sweden in the late 20th century. However, from an international
perspective there is reason to believe that the characteristics of Swedish teacher
students differ slightly from comparable groups. The average age of Swedish students
is the highest in Europe (Statistics Sweden 2013) and the gender distribution appears to
be somewhat more even than in, for example, the U.S. (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2013).
At the time when they attended pre-service teacher education, the Swedish version
had recently been reformed and divided into two main tracks: ‘the program for early
ages’ (grades 1–7) and ‘the program for later ages’ (grades 4–9). All of our respondents
attended the program for early ages and were, after graduation, certificated to teach
primary and secondary school. But not in all subjects. The program was divided into two
areas, language/social sciences or mathematics/natural sciences, which restricted their
certification. 78% of the cohort studied social sciences, whereas the rest studied natural
sciences. However, this was not equally distributed among women and men, with 84%
of the women studying language/social sciences and 63% of the men.
It is important to emphasize that we treat our dataset as a unique cohort case-study.
As such, we do not intend to generalize the findings and do not use any inferential
statistics such as p-values, confidence intervals, posteriors or Bayes Factors.
250 R. CARLSSON ET AL.

Results
The school level
The simplest way of illustrating the value of teacher education is to state the percentage
working as teachers after a set number of years. After five years this is 73.6% in our cohort, and
at our last measurement after 23 years, it is 63.9%. A more informative estimate, however, is the
average percentage of total working time that the individuals spend as teachers during their
careers. In the cohort this figure is 76.3%.
A more detailed view can be found in Figure 1 that shows the yearly activities for each of the
87 participants. TraMineR automatically interpolates missing data within sequences for indivi-
duals, but not for years when we did not collect data. The figure shows for each individual what
they are doing each year. Note that we did not collect data for some years, and therefore the
X-axis should be interpreted as fixed years, rather than a true continuous timeline. Also note
that an ending sequence (empty cells as opposed to grey cells for missing data) means that
a participant has discontinued his/her participation in the study.
First of all it may be worth noting that all the graduates in our cohort work as teachers at
some point in their careers. Secondly, a majority of the graduates start working as teachers
from day one and continue to do so during their careers. Some, however, take some time off
for parental leave. There are also a few individuals who work less consistently as teachers, and
have unemployment spells or work with other things some years, but later return to teaching
and after 23 years still remain in the profession. After 10–15 years a period of transition occurs
when some teachers advance into management, and about the same time, a handful move on
to other types of educational jobs. This is also a period where a group of teachers leave the
profession for other jobs, as can be seen in the transitions in Figure 1.
14 19 24 29 34 39 44 49 54 59 64 69 74 79 84

Teacher

Education job

Management
87 seq. (n=87)

Parental leave

Studying

Other job

Not working

missing
9
5
1

1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 2000 2008 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

Figure 1. Yearly activities for each of the 87 participants.

Note: Grey colour is missing data for that particular year and participant. White fields represent missing data for entire
sequences after an individual has opted out of the study.
 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF TEACHER EDUCATION 251

From the school level perspective the interesting summary statistics is time spent in
the educational system. Since some attrition is actually advancement into management,
the figure 76.3% (total working time spent in teaching) increases to 79.9% (total working
time spent in teaching and school management).
If we, on top of this, regard parental leave as unavoidable but temporary attrition, the
figure increases to 83.9% (total working time spent in teaching, school management and
temporary parental leave). Viewing parental leave as only temporary attrition may come
as a surprise to some readers. However, in our cohort, parental leave did not trigger
leaving the profession permanently for even a single individual. Furthermore, Swedish
statistics show that 95% of Swedish women are back in employment after three years of
maternal leave (Statistics Sweden 2007). This number differs from international studies
on returning teachers. In the United States, for example, only about 35–40% of the
women who leave the workforce after the birth of a child return to teaching (Vera 2013).

The societal level

From a societal perspective, we should also include those who work outside the school
system but in the educational sector, which increases the figure to 85.4%. Thus, as
shown in Table 2, teacher graduates in the cohort spend 85.4% of their working years
after graduation as teachers, managers in the school system, or in educational jobs that
probably would not have been available had they not had their teacher education. The
value of teacher education is therefore, from a societal perspective, best estimated as
85.4%, a figure quite different from the 5-year (73.6%) or 23-year (63.9%) follow-up on
whether one is working as a teacher or not.
Looking at the 14.6% ‘failures’ (time spent outside the educational sector) two and
half percentage of the time is spent not working at all. This includes sabbaticals, sick
leave and early retirement, a probably unavoidable form of attrition. Three percent of
the time is spent studying. Looking closely at the material, we see that some study to
improve their teacher training, but some studies lead to an entirely different career. This
can be seen in Figure 1, where the trajectories after studying either result in a teaching
career or some other career.
Summing up we can see that only 9% of the total working time during 23 years is
spent in occupations outside the educational sector. In order to gain an under-
standing of whether those who have left teaching and the educational sector still
feel that their teacher education is contributing to their own or others’ growth, we
relied on a qualitative approach based on written information and follow-up
interviews.

Table 2. Mean percentage of time spent in different activities across careers.

Sector Activity Percentage time spent Cumulative percentage
School sector Teacher 76.3 % 76.3 %
Management 3.6 % 79.9 %
Parental leave 4.0 % 83.9 %
Educational sector Educational job 1.5 % 85.4%
Other Studying 2.8 % 88.2 %
Other job 9.3 % 97.5 %
Not working 2.5 % 100 %
252 R. CARLSSON ET AL.

The individual level

From an individual growth perspective all the ‘leavers’ express a sense of security by having
a vocational education to fall back on. Having a business career outside the educational sector
does not mean that a return to teaching is unthinkable. It is worth noting that a majority of the
individuals in the cohort who have left teaching, express that they would consider returning,
when asked 20 years after graduation. What would it take to make them return? In our data, as
well as in other studies, we can see that working conditions such as pay (Johnson and Kardos
2008), status, manageable assignments (Newberry and Allsop 2017) and less accountability
pressure (Gallant and Riley 2014), are mentioned as crucial aspects. However, the findings also
indicate that the chance is low for all leavers to return to school. Individuals who quit teaching
due to traumatic turning points, or not being able to develop a personal teacher identity that
sits comfortably with their own sense of self, in combination with opportunity structures that
enable them alternative careers (Lindqvist and Nordänger 2016; Yinon and Orland- Barak 2017;
Beaudin 2008), are probably not tempted to return to a teaching position.
But unwillingness to re-enter teaching does not mean that the commitment for
schools, children, learning and education has faded (cf. Peske et al. 2001; Anderson
and Olsen 2006, 2007; Hammerness 2008). Many of the leavers claim that they, in some
sense, are still ‘teachers’.
So you are still, in a way, a teacher?
Yes! Really. That’s what I’m passionate about. (‘Lisa’, web designer, interview, 2014)
Interestingly, even if the leavers are no longer in formal teaching positions, they still
describe that they are bringing professional expertise and commitment into society at
large. Examples include school board members, working with housing for refugee
children and volunteering for BRIS, Children’s Rights in Society.
But then I began to discover that I missed some of it [to be a teacher], to be able to make
a difference. As a teacher I actually did things every day that made a difference. And then
I started to reflect on precisely what I missed. . . And then BRIS [Children’s Rights in Society]
appeared and I realized that without too much effort I could contribute and make
a difference. (‘Britt’, sales and marketing, interview 2014)

Some of the leavers even find themselves making a better contribution to children’s
development in a new context outside of school and teaching.
It is fantastic. I can make a tremendous effort for these children. I can make them grow and
I can get the support I need. . . (‘Anders’, works with refugees, interview 2014).

Even though teacher education and teaching experiences seem to have a low value as
a merit when looking for another job, many of the former teachers claim that the
professional skills they have developed during teacher education or teaching have led
to individual growth and skills that come in handy in their new professions. For some of
them it also seems like these skills are beneficial to other individuals in the community.

Discussion
In the present research we have tried to show that it is a complicated matter to directly
relate teacher attrition to whether or not teacher education has been valuable. We argue
that the most relevant estimates include actual teaching but also school management and
 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF TEACHER EDUCATION 253

other educational jobs. Furthermore, we find that the best way of estimating teacher
attrition is not to regard the percentage working as teachers a certain year, but rather
the overall time spent in teaching and/or educational management. Looking at it this way,
we find that 83.9% of the working time for our cohort of Swedish teachers is spent working
as teachers or in school management, meaning that the loss for the school system, over
a period of 23 years, is just 16.1% of teacher graduates. When we add educational work
outside the school system the retention figure is slightly increased to 85.4%, and thus the
attrition rate decreases to 14.6% from a societal and economic perspective.
Estimating the value of teacher education from an individual growth perspective for
those who do not work as teachers is quite difficult. First, we notice that only 9.3% of the
overall working time is spent in occupations with no explicit or implicit relations to
educational matters. And then an analysis of subjective opinions reveals a common trait,
that even if their working time is spent outside education they apprehend their teacher
education as valuable. Perhaps this narration is in part due to people being unwilling to
admit that they spent a few years doing something not worthwhile. Yet, one could
argue the opposite. If people truly felt that their teacher education had not been useful
to them in their careers and lives, we would have heard some disappointed or angry
voices. After all, spending several years on an education, often taking loans to be able to
do this, not earning any money from a job during the process, etc., for something that is
pointless, would be very frustrating. From a salutogenic perspective we can also see that
many of the leavers still contribute to the development of other individuals in society.
This is something which causes us to point to the potential societal value for this group
of ‘highly engaged switchers’ (Watt and Richardson 2008) of contributing to the learning
and development of people in their communities and society at large.
Recently, proposals to shorten teacher education and to launch fast tracks into the
teaching profession have been suggested. In the short term, this could counteract
teacher shortages. However, these suggestions contain a potential risk of not giving
enough opportunities for teacher students to develop stable professional identities,
leading not only to higher attrition rates (Ingersoll 2003) but also to serial careers
becoming the norm (Roness and Smith 2010) and teaching becoming a temporary
business. This would then threaten the value of teacher education on all three levels.
It is important to emphasize that the three perspectives we adopted in this article (school,
societal and individual) are only examples of useful perspectives. The important message is
not that these three perspectives are the most important to consider, but that it matters
a great deal what perspective we adopt when interpreting the attrition figures.
In conclusion, we find that in order to get informative estimates of educational value in
relation to teacher attrition it is important to consider the matter from different perspec-
tives and – if possible – look at the working time spent throughout a career rather than the
percentage leaving after a set number of years. Indeed, attrition is not always permanent
and we should be careful when we interpret and make use of general statistics. These
figures are necessary and useful and they are all ‘true’ in one sense. But how we should
understand and explain them must vary. A recent example is the repeatedly painted
picture of Swedish teachers fleeing the profession. With arguments drawn from statistics
leading politicians and experts have introduced this ‘truth’ in the school debate. But the
picture is somewhat misleading. The same statistics used in another way on the contrary
show that Swedish teachers stay longer in the profession today than before and that they
254 R. CARLSSON ET AL.

also stay longer than comparable professions (DN 2016). 2011–2013 the average attrition
rate among Swedish teachers was 4.7% per year. Among civil engineers, economists and
lawyers, it was about twice as common to change occupations (11.2%, 9.2% and 8.2%
respectively). But still teacher attrition is described as an alarming educational issue in
Sweden. And it is – in some cases. Returning to the first lines of the introduction of this
article: ‘The evident purpose of teacher education seems simple enough: to enable
individuals to work as competent and skilled teachers.’ In this article we have focused on
the words ‘work as teachers’ and ignored the words ‘competent’ and ‘skilled’. To the latter
we could add words such as passionate, appreciated, autonomous and professionally
satisfied. Not all attrition can be regarded as lack of resilience (Smith and Ulvik 2017) or
even negatively, but some of it really is. Teachers leaving the profession due to increased
accountability pressure, a loss of collegiality, poor leadership or other working conditions
that are possible to affect and avoid present the real problem. We truly agree with
Kelchtermans (2017, 965) who argues that as an educational issue ‘teacher attrition and
retention refers to the need to prevent good teachers from leaving the job for the wrong
reasons’. Using arbitrarily selected international statistics on a one-shot-basis in order to
create ‘crisis scenarios’ or to address national problems regarding teacher attrition seems to
be a bad idea. Future research on teacher attrition should therefore also try to comprise
issues of context, teacher quality and reasons for leaving.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This work was supported by the Vetenskapsrådet [2015-01390].

Notes on contributors
Rickard Carlsson, Ph.D. is a senior lecturer in psychology with a special interest in research
methods, meta-analysis and statistics.
Per Lindqvist, Ph.D. and Ulla Karin Nordänger, Ph.D. are professors in education. Their special
interests are teachers work, life and knowledge.

ORCID
Rickard Carlsson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6456-5735

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