Teaching in the Australian Capital Territory: exploring the experiences of teachers using mixed methods and interpretive phenomenological analysis

• Main Author: Griffiths, Stacey
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: attrition; teacher; SCCT; Australia; Education; Dowling; Ewing; Greenland; Pedersen; Riley; Alaska
• Online Access: https://research.usq.edu.au/item/q6491/teaching-in-the-australian-capital-territory-exploring-the-experiences-of-teachers-using-mixed-methods-and-interpretive-phenomenological-analysis; https://research.usq.edu.au/download/efb03c8fa437d26ce46a3f46fdcb3c8fc7a44f4ae13f5adcd4b11c3f7117330e/4092861/Griffiths%20Stacey%20PhD%20Thesis%20-amended%2010.2.2021.pdf; https://doi.org/10.26192/2ttm-bx58

This thesis is an exploration of the experiences of teachers in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). It aims to determine what may lead to decreased job satisfaction or motivation, to better understand potential drivers of teacher attrition. Teacher attrition and retention, and what drives the phenomenon, have been areas of focus internationally in countries such as the United States of America (USA) (Ingersoll, 2003; Ingersoll, May, & Collins, 2017), the United Kingdom (UK) (Chambers, Hobson, & Tracey, 2010; Hobson, 2009), Greenland (Brincker & Pedersen, 2020), Alaska (Kaden, Patterson, Healy, & Adams, 2016) and Australia (Gallant & Riley, 2017; Mason & Matas, 2015; Weldon, 2018) for many years. Retention is economically cheaper than recruitment (Borman & Dowling, 2017), furthermore, retaining teachers maintains higher levels of experience and intellectual capital within the profession (Gallant & Riley, 2017; Ingersoll et al., 2017). Having high quality teachers leads to high quality outcomes for students (Young, 2018), and this is another reason why schools and education systems are eager to attract, grow and retain the best quality teachers possible. There are a wide range of factors discussed in this thesis, which have been linked with attrition of teachers, but there is still a need for further development and exploration of the phenomenon from a theoretical perspective (Mason & Matas, 2015). There are frequent reports in the literature (Cox & Connell., 2016; Ewing & Manuel, 2005; Manuel & Carter, 2016) and in the media (Brennan, 2016; McKinnon & Walker, 2016) which suggest that up to 50% of beginning teachers leave the profession within their first three to five years of teaching. Recently it has been suggested that these numbers are not as high as once thought (Weldon, 2018), and therefore, this thesis attempts to explore whether attrition risks (through job satisfaction and intent to leave data) are as high in beginning teachers as in more ...