What the data shows
DfE follows each qualifying cohort – everyone who gained QTS in a given year – and reports how many are still in state-funded schools in England each year afterwards.
The shape is steep early and shallow later: about 89.7% after one year, 75.8% after three, 67.4% after five, and 57.7% after ten. Roughly four in ten of the ten-year cohort are no longer in a state-funded school in England.
Before that, there is the training-to-classroom step. On the latest published ITT Performance Profiles, 93% of secondary postgraduate trainees achieved QTS, and 77% of those achieving QTS were recorded teaching in a state-funded school within 16 months. That employment measure is provisional.
Four checkpoints, four different cohorts
The single most common misreading of retention statistics is to treat those four percentages as one group followed through time. They are not.
The one-year figure describes the 2024 cohort. The ten-year figure describes people who qualified in 2015 – a different set of people, entering a different labour market, under a different induction regime. Later cohorts simply have fewer years of data, which is why the series are different lengths.
Equally, ‘not retained’ does not mean ‘left teaching’. It means no longer in a state-funded school in England. Some of those teachers moved to independent schools, to further education colleges, or overseas; some returned later. The measure cannot distinguish them.
Where the picture has actually deteriorated
Comparing like with like – the same checkpoint across successive cohorts – is more revealing than the headline curve.
Five-year retention has drifted down: 70.1% for the 2011 cohort, falling to 67.4% for the 2020 cohort, the lowest in the published series.
First-year retention, by contrast, has held up well and recent cohorts look comparatively strong. The pressure is therefore concentrated in the medium term – years three to five – rather than in the immediate post-qualification period that induction support is designed to address.
Why this matters
Training a teacher is expensive, and bursaries in shortage subjects now reach £29,000 before a trainee has taught a lesson. The return on that investment depends on years in the classroom, not on arrival.
For school leaders, the medium-term dip lands precisely when a teacher becomes most valuable – experienced enough to take on responsibility, not yet established in leadership.
And for anyone comparing across sectors, note that these figures are not comparable with college retention. The further education measure is built differently, from different records, with a different definition of entering and leaving the sector.