Neither Status Nor Support Travels Alone: Policy Borrowing and Early-Career Teacher Retention in Finland and New Zealand

In recent policy discourse, Finland and New Zealand have featured prominently as examples of approaches to strengthening the teaching profession. Finland is commonly associated with professional trust, selective teacher preparation, and relatively high societal recognition of teachers, while New Zealand is associated with formal induction and mentoring for beginning teachers. Despite these different policy emphases, both countries continue to face challenges in early-career teacher retention. According to the OECD's TALIS 2024 findings, 23% of Finnish and 22% of New Zealand lower secondary teachers under the age of 30 intended to leave teaching within five years, with both estimates statistically similar to the OECD average of 20%. The Finnish estimate increased by 13 percentage points between 2018 and 2024, whereas the New Zealand estimate did not change significantly. Drawing on these indicators, policy documentation, comparative education scholarship, and the Job Demands–Resources framework, this article examines how professional status, early-career support, and workplace demands intersect in the two contexts. It argues that neither professional status nor formal mentoring should be treated as a standalone solution to teacher retention. Rather, the practical value of each depends on the configuration of job demands, available resources, and institutional conditions in which it operates. The article therefore conceptualizes international policy examples as context-dependent hypotheses for investigation rather than directly transferable solutions and proposes a diagnostic approach to policy borrowing that considers local conditions, implementation, and evaluation.