What happens to teachers after maternity leave?
Report reveals teachers who go on maternity leave less likely to quit in medium-term
● Teachers who go on maternity leave are less likely than the rest of the profession to quit their school in the medium-term, especially if they work part-time
● But schools still fail to hold onto thousands of teachers in their first year back from maternity leave
● An alarming three-fifths of teachers at London secondary schools leave their school within four years of starting maternity leave
The first large-scale analysis of what happens to teachers who go on maternity leave shows that - contrary to popular opinion - they are less likely than the rest of the profession to leave their post within four years.
It has been widely assumed that the crisis in teacher recruitment and retention is in part due to women in their 30s, who make up the largest cohort of the profession, finding it too challenging to combine their roles with parenthood.
However, a new report by The Key Group, based on 150,000 teachers, has found that those who go on maternity leave are less likely than the rest of the profession to quit their school over a four year period, as long as they are given the opportunity to work part-time.
The report’s authors say the findings serve as compelling evidence for schools and trusts to stop dismissing part-time working as being “too complex to administer”. They argue that in light of spiralling teacher vacancies, the profession urgently needs to be as accommodating as possible of flexible and part-time working to “keep its best talent”.
The findings reveal:
● Teachers who go on maternity leave are much less likely than the rest of the profession to quit their school in the medium-term, especially if they work part-time.
Just 32% of teachers quit their school within four years of starting maternity leave, if they switch to a part-time role. This rises to a worrying 45% for teachers who go on maternity leave and return to a full-time role. It is 39% when it includes both teachers who go on maternity leave and return to part-time or full-time roles.
In comparison, on average 42% of teachers across the whole profession quit their school within the same four-year period, with the figure rising to 44% for male teachers only.
The difference between the 32% and 42% equates to around 50,000 teachers.
● Schools and trusts are failing to hold onto teachers in their first year back from maternity leave
A considerable proportion of teachers - 17% - quit their school within a year of returning from maternity leave - a much higher percentage than the 12% who leave their school each year across the profession.
● London secondaries suffer from a particularly poor retention rate after maternity leave and there is a significant difference between primaries and secondaries.
An exceptionally high proportion of London secondary school teachers - 60% - left their school within four years of starting maternity leave - much higher than the national average of 42% for secondary teachers across England. However, this finding is based on a relatively small sample: just 162 London secondary teachers out of 1,123 secondary teachers across England who had been on maternity leave.
Primary school teachers are less likely than their secondary school colleagues to quit their school within four years of starting maternity leave, at 37% compared to 42%. This gap between primary and secondary school teachers suggests that teachers who go on maternity leave aren’t necessarily leaving their roles in greater numbers as a result of external pressures, such as the cost of living or childcare, as these are challenges shared by all parents. It is more likely to be a result of factors within schools themselves.
● Teachers are twice as likely to be in a part-time role four years on from starting maternity leave, compared to their colleagues in the teaching profession as a whole.
Some 40% of teachers are in part-time roles four years after they go on maternity leave, compared to 20% across the profession.
Chris Kenyon, Group CEO of The Key Group, a leading provider of technology, tools and content to schools and trusts to enable them to work smarter and save time, said:
“This report makes it clear that teachers who go on maternity leave are some of the most committed members of the profession. It’s encouraging to see more schools and trusts turning their commitment into action. That means doing everything they can to accommodate part-time and flexible working, whether through smart timetabling, modern tools or progressive retention and promotion policies. By making the system work for returning mothers, schools are keeping talented women in teaching where they’re needed most.”
Baroness Mary Bousted, Chair of the Teaching Commission, which is looking into the profession’s recruitment and retention crisis, said:
“It’s no longer good enough, indeed it never was, to put part-time and flexible working in the ‘too difficult’ drawer. Flexible working means a lot of different things and rather than the ‘computer says no’ response we often see, we need, as a profession, to ask: ‘How can we accommodate this request in order to keep our best talent?”
Liz Robinson, CEO of Big Education, a trust of three schools, said:
“Returning from maternity leave can be one of the most vulnerable points in a mother’s career. As schools and trusts, we have an ethical, social and moral responsibility to support these teachers and help them thrive. Women are over-represented in the teaching workforce and yet we’re losing too many talented teachers and leaders who don’t see the profession offering the flexibility they need. As a trust CEO, I know how challenging flexible working requests can be to implement, but I also know that sometimes it only takes small adjustments: handing over the register to someone else, or phasing a return from two to three days a week. We have to find a way to keep these teachers.”
Lisa Marriott, Chief People Officer of Embark Federation, which manages 22 schools, said:
“Flexible working isn’t a perk, it’s a necessary part of keeping brilliant people in education. Lives evolve, and if we want to keep hold of talent, our systems and leadership need to evolve too. This isn’t about lowering standards, it’s about leading with trust, designing roles differently, and doing right by the people who make schools work. At Embark Federation, we already have lots of people working flexibly, but are doing more to define what types of flexibility matters to our people, how we can say yes, and thinking as a system to make it happen.”
The report urgently recommends schools and trusts:
● Are proactive in aligning their retention strategy and the culture of their organisation to support returning mothers
● Evaluate their retention and working pattern data for teachers who have had maternity leave
● Support teachers returning from maternity leave, not just in the year they come back, but over the first few years after their return through professional coaching or buddying with existing staff
● Enable teachers returning after maternity leave to work part-time if requested because this increases retention rates
● Support female secondary school teachers who have had children in particular because they leave their school at a higher rate than their peers in primary schools
● Advertise vacancies as being open to flexible working, part-time working and job share arrangements, to support teachers to move between schools after having maternity leave, as well as facilitating career progression
● Facilitate a more strategic and iterative approach to timetabling, involving multiple members of the SLT to ensure timetables are aligned with the school’s retention strategy
● Consider whether termly updates to the timetable are possible to accommodate teachers making requests throughout the year
The report used anonymised, aggregated data on teacher contracts and teacher absences from Arbor, the management information system which is part of The Key Group. The report’s researchers used a sample of nearly 150,000 teachers who had a teaching contract at one of 6,706 schools in England in September 2020 and tracked what happened to them over the next four years to September 2024. Nearly 3,000 teachers in the sample had started maternity leave in 2020/21. The researchers looked at whether this group was still in post four years later and compared this with the wider sample.
