Teachers’ working conditions, wellbeing and retention: an exploratory analysis to identify the key factors associated with teachers’ intention to leave

Abstract This article investigates the key factors associated with Australian teachers' intentions to leave their roles by examining their working conditions, experiences of work and mental health through the concept of the psychosocial work environment. Utilising a dataset of 744 primary and secondary teachers in mainstream Australian government schools, we applied confirmatory factor analysis to validate the measurement model of teachers’ working conditions and health and wellbeing. This was followed by stepwise regression on a total of 36 variables related to teachers’ working conditions and health and wellbeing to select 14 key explanatory variables for our linear regression model. We employed mixed-effects and linear regression analyses to examine the association between 14 key variables and teachers’ intentions to leave. Our analysis indicated that several factors were negatively associated with teachers’ intentions to leave their roles, including commitment to the school, job satisfaction and meaning of work. In contrast, a greater number of factors were positively associated with intentions to leave, including emotional demands, conflict between work and family life, exposure to work-related violence, workload, stress and depressive symptoms. Furthermore, the analysis identified career stage as a significant factor associated with intention to leave, with mid-career teachers and late-mid-career/advanced-career teachers in the sample being more likely to express intentions to leave than their early career counterparts. By drawing on the concept of the psychosocial work environment and considering working conditions, experiences of work and mental health, this study identifies key factors that are worthy of further research attention, provides a broad, exploratory conceptual approach to understand how these variables are interconnected and underscores the necessity of holistic integrated approaches to promoting teacher retention.