Retention is the New Recruitment

Why keeping great teachers matters more than finding them.

It’s the default response when schools face staffing challenges. Post another job ad, expand the search radius, offer signing bonuses, attend more graduate recruitment fairs. The assumption is simple: if we cast a wider net, we’ll catch more fish.

At the system level, the response follows a similar pattern. Federal and state governments typically respond to teacher shortages by funding undergraduate training programs, expanding alternative certification pathways, and investing in other pipeline-generating strategies. While these supply-side solutions address future workforce potential, they do little to address the immediate crisis of keeping and developing the experienced professionals already working in schools.

And here’s what the data tells us: while schools scramble to fill vacancies, they’re simultaneously losing experienced, effective teachers at unprecedented rates. Both Australia and the United States face retention crises that make recruitment efforts feel like filling a bucket with a massive hole in the bottom.

We’re fighting the wrong battle.

In today’s education landscape, keeping the great teachers you already have isn’t just more cost-effective than finding new ones—it’s the key to sustainable school improvement and student success.

The Mathematics of Loss

Consider this: the true cost of teacher turnover extends far beyond recruitment expenses. Research from the Learning Policy Institute estimates that teacher turnover costs US schools approximately $20,000 per departing teacher, with high-need schools facing costs up to $24,000 per departure (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017). In Australia, while comprehensive national data is limited, studies suggest similar patterns with turnover costs ranging from $15,000-$30,000 AUD per teacher when factoring in recruitment, training, and productivity losses (Weldon, 2018).

The real cost lies in what walks out the door. When any experienced staff member leaves—whether teacher, principal, IT coordinator, or business manager—they take with them:

• Deep knowledge of your school’s systems, culture, and student needs
• Established relationships with students, families, and colleagues
• Years of refined practice and institutional wisdom
• Investment in professional learning and development

Consider what happens when your IT manager leaves mid-year. They don’t just take technical knowledge—they take understanding of every workaround, every system integration, every teacher’s individual tech comfort level. Suddenly, simple issues become complex problems, teaching is disrupted, and frustrated staff start questioning whether this is the right place for them.

Or when a beloved Principal departs. The relationship capital they’ve built with families, the trust established with staff, the deep understanding of community context—none of this transfers in a handover document. Frequently, their replacement requires multiple years to reach the same level of effectiveness. During a significant leadership transition, leadership team dynamics shift and it is common for existing staff to absorb additional workload as new ways of working are introduced while old ways have not yet fallen away—creating conditions that sometimes trigger further departures.

They are complex challenges – certainly more complex than just “recruiting harder” will solve.

The Inconvenient Truth About Turnover

In our conversations with school leaders, I consistently hear the same challenge: it is common to spend significant time on hiring, but continue to feel like understaffing pressure persists.

The numbers support their experience. Schools across Australia and the United States are losing staff across all roles faster than they can replace them. In Australia, early career teacher attrition rate is approaching 40% within the first five years, while the US sees similar patterns with 17% of teachers leaving annually and an estimated 44% departing within five years.

Here’s what’s less discussed—both countries are also losing mid-career and experienced support staff from every department: business managers seeking less stressful environments, IT coordinators moving to higher-paying corporate roles, HR Managers (if you’re lucky enough to have one) turning over faster than teachers, and seasoned Principals retiring early due to unsustainable workloads.

The ripple effects are profound. When your finance manager leaves, it’s not just about finding someone who can manage budgets—it’s about losing someone who understood your school’s funding complexities, vendor relationships, and financial rhythms. When your grounds supervisor departs, you lose intimate knowledge of every facility quirk, maintenance schedule, and safety consideration that keeps your school running smoothly.

Retention is a systemic challenge that affect every aspect of school operations.

Many schools understandably focus their limited resources on immediate staffing needs—recruitment becomes urgent when classrooms need covering. This reactive approach, while necessary, inadvertently creates a cycle where mindful retention perpetually takes a backseat to just filling positions.

The Retention Advantage

Schools that prioritise retention across all roles enjoy compounding benefits that recruitment cannot:

Knowledge Preservation: Experienced staff—from teachers to technicians—understand your unique context, challenges, and what works in your specific environment. This knowledge is often irreplaceable and requires years to rebuild after a significant departure.

Relationship Depth: It’s not just teacher-student relationships that matter. When your business manager knows every family by name, when your maintenance supervisor understands exactly how to support outdoor learning programs, when your deputy principal has built trust with the community—these relationships create the fabric that holds school culture together.

Operational Continuity: Schools are complex ecosystems. Your librarian doesn’t just manage books—they understand how resources align with curriculum, which teachers need what support, and how to foster a love of learning. Your business manager doesn’t just process payroll—they understand the financial rhythms that keep the school running smoothly.

Team Stability: Consistent staffing allows teams to develop shared practices, collaborative relationships, and collective efficacy—all proven drivers of school improvement.

Cost Efficiency: Every teacher you retain is money not spent on recruitment, advertising, and onboarding. These savings can be redirected to professional learning, resources, or retention initiatives.

Cultural Continuity: School culture develops over time through shared experiences and consistent messaging. High turnover fractures culture, requiring constant rebuilding effort.

What Great Retention Looks Like in Practice

Schools that achieve exceptional retention rates apply systematic approaches to workforce management that reach beyond traditional recruitment strategies.

They start with understanding why people stay, not just why they leave. Exit interviews are useful, but “stay interviews” with your best performers reveal what’s working and what’s at risk.

They recognise that retention begins on day one. Effective onboarding, mentoring programs, and clear pathways for growth signal long-term investment in staff development.

They address workload sustainability before burnout occurs. This means realistic expectations, efficient systems, and protection of teachers’ time for what matters most—teaching and learning.

They create career pathways that don’t require leaving the classroom. Not every great teacher wants to become an administrator, but they all want opportunities to grow, lead, and contribute meaningfully.

They use data to identify retention risks early. Monitoring core HR metrics, resilience, culture and career progression patterns to enable proactive intervention before good people reach the decision to leave.

Superintendent Shannon Cox of the Montgomery County Educational Service Centre (MCESC), Ohio has been working with her team, who oversee 19 Districts of schools across the state of Ohio in the United States, to walk the journey from “peak recruitment”
to the prioritisation of “peak retention”:

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure. By looking at our HR data we’ve been able to better understand some of the contributors to turnover rather than just treating the symptoms. Taking a data-driven approach is transforming how we think about retention challenges and allocate our resources where they’ll have the greatest impact.

Understanding key concepts like staff resilience at an organizational level gives us a strategic advantage without compromising individual privacy. We can identify which teams or departments might be under pressure and proactively provide targeted support—whether that’s additional professional development, workload redistribution, or wellness initiatives—before we reach a crisis point.

From our perspective, every district should have a deliberate way of doing Workforce Strategy and be focused on how they’re ensuring strong retention because reactive hiring is both expensive and unsustainable. Our ESA’s Organizational Care Plan has become the foundation for everything we’re doing to make MCESC a great place to work. We’re working hard to shift our focus from constantly filling positions to creating an environment where talented people want to stay and grow.”

The Strategic Shift

It’s important to be clear: retention and recruitment are (obviously) not the same thing. They are fundamentally different processes requiring distinct strategies and expertise. Both are critical.

Academically, recruitment focuses on attraction, selection, and onboarding of new talent. There are “old school” ways to do recruitment and new. Staying up to date on the difference is critical to effective recruitment of people who are more likely to stay.

Retention centres on engagement, development, and creating conditions that encourage existing staff to stay.

The skills, systems, and mindsets required to excel at each (recruitment and retention) are different, and conflating them can lead to ineffectively resourcing both.

But here’s the strategic reality: in today’s market, schools and systems that excel at retention dramatically reduce their recruitment burden.

Making retention your recruitment strategy requires a fundamental mindset shift. Instead of asking “How do we find more teachers?” successful schools and systems ask “How do we become the kind of place where great teachers choose to stay?”

This shift changes everything:

• Professional learning becomes career investment, not compliance
• Performance management becomes growth support, not evaluation pressure
• Workload becomes strategic resource allocation, not task accumulation
• Culture becomes living our mission (and essential competitive advantage for talent), not nice-to-have

Schools making this strategic transition aren’t just surviving the teacher supply shortage—they’re thriving despite it.

The Retention Revolution

We’re at an inflection point in K-12 education workforce management globally. The traditional “recruit and replace” model is unsustainable in today’s market, whether you’re leading a school in Sydney or New York, Melbourne or Montana. The schools that recognise this reality and pivot to retention-first strategies will have significant competitive advantages – and make the biggest difference for their students and communities.

They’ll spend less on recruitment while building stronger, more effective teams. They’ll create environments where teachers want to stay and grow, naturally attracting others who want to be part of something special. They’ll develop the organisational capacity that only comes from stable, experienced staffing.

Most importantly, they’ll provide better outcomes for students—because when great teachers stay, student learning thrives.

The future belongs to schools that master retention. The question isn’t whether you need better recruitment strategies—it’s whether you’re ready to become a place where excellent educators choose to build their careers.

Your best recruitment strategy might just be keeping the great people you already have.