Are teachers leaving…
- Things Education
- Oct 17
- 6 min read
…or staying and teaching?
Hello all. Welcome to the 136th edition of TEPS Weekly!
A few days ago, we came across a newspaper article asking why teachers are leaving their profession. The article started by asserting that teachers are moving away from teaching for various reasons, which included school tasks and social issues. It cited a report jointly written by UNESCO and the ILO. This article did a few rounds on the professional circles in public (LinkedIn) and also in more private circles (WhatsApp groups). Interestingly, nowhere did we see the point raised that the original UNESCO/ILO report was not about India. We all assumed that it is probably the same in India – that teachers are leaving. However, at Things Education, we thought of questioning this assumption.
Are teachers leaving?
The two major reasons why we wanted to question the assumption that teachers were leaving were: one, the original report was not about India, and two, this was a report that came out in 2003. 2003 – Virat Kohli will not play for India for another 5 years! Greta Thunberg has just been born in Sweden. And Atal Bihari Vajpayee has not yet finished his first full term as the Indian Prime Minister. So, let’s ask in 2025, are Indian teachers leaving? And the answer is, “It’s complicated!”
One of the latest UNESCO reports states that the number of teachers is increasing in India. In fact, the rate of increase in teacher numbers makes UNESCO cautiously optimistic that India could meet the 2030 target for appointing the required number of teachers (estimates suggest India will need 11 lakh more teachers by 2030). In secondary schools, India is going at 1.5x the rate needed to reach the global benchmark for 2030. But the question is, even if India is adding more teachers than expected to meet global standards in the future, what about today?
Let’s look at the availability of teachers today. One way is to look at the pupil-teacher ratio (PTR). High PTRs (e.g. 60:1) signify teacher shortages and an overstretched teaching staff, while low PTRs (e.g. 10:1) may represent surplus teacher capacity. The NEP 2020 has recommended PTR to be around 30:1.
India has been moving in the right direction in the last decade – from more than 40:1 in 2016 to around 30:1 in 2022 to 25:1 in 2023 and 24:1 in 2024. If the PTR has reduced and the average PTR of India is 24:1, it surely means that we have enough teachers. This could also imply that teachers are not leaving or that new teachers are getting recruited faster than teachers leaving. So is that it? Is there no teacher shortage in India? Maybe, not. Like we said earlier, it’s complicated.
In a vast and diverse country like India, there are many variables to think about – state, learning stage, rural/urban, government school or private school – and PTRs change a lot across these variables. Overall in 2022, Delhi, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar had a PTR of more than 30:1. This changed to only Bihar and Jharkhand having a greater than 30:1 PTR in 2024, and to Bihar, Jharkhand and Gujarat in 2025. So, there are specific states that need focused attention in getting teacher numbers up.
We constantly see that PTRs are high at the secondary level. This stems from the fact that the teachers who are subject matter experts are very difficult to get. This issue is exacerbated in rural areas – the PTRs seem good as the number of students is low, but there is a dearth of skilled teachers. In rural areas, there is also the issue of single teacher schools, where a teacher needs to help students from across the grades.
So what can we say about teachers leaving? The number of teachers in the country is increasing, leading to low overall PTR. At the same time, there are multiple states, learning levels and geographies where specific vacancies still exist and need to be filled.
UNESCO says that attrition rates of less than 5% are okay to sustain a teaching ecosystem like India’s, and the attrition rates of government teachers in India is lower (2% for females and 1.6% for males).
So from all indicators here, we can say that mostly teachers are not leaving, and even if teachers are leaving, there are more and more teachers coming into teaching. In all government schools, the total number of teaching vacancies is around 7.5 lakhs from the latest data available, and this represents about 15% of all teaching positions in Indian government schools. Maybe UDISE+ should start collecting data on teacher retention just like they do for student retention for us to be exactly sure how many teachers are leaving.
Let’s get more data
Only if there is data or information collection can the data be analysed and inferences be made. Without the actual data, we can have opinions at worst and guesses or hypotheses at best. Getting retention rates data for teachers is a good starting point, and we should also collect data on teacher ability.
Now that we are familiar with PTR, let’s understand PTTR or pupil-trained teacher ratio. This number tells us how many students are being taught by one trained teacher. A trained teacher is defined as a person with a minimum qualification criteria like having a B.Ed degree or having a Masters degree in the subject they teach. Unlike PTR, PTTR is an indicator of the quality of teachers a student has access to. In a country where there is a minimum qualification for any teacher to start teaching, the PTR should be the same as the PTTR. Do Indian teachers need to have a basic qualification to teach? Should UDISE+ be collecting and sharing PTTR data as well? Will a discrepancy in PTR and PTTR in India show the real cracks in the Indian education system?
Why would teachers leave?
In any case, we know that around 1.5% of the teachers are leaving. The newspaper article referred to at the beginning of this piece also mentioned some possible reasons for this, but we could not find any data directly linking any of the reasons mentioned to teachers leaving – maybe because not many teachers have a recorded exit interview (if you want to share some of these experiences or know of a data source, we would be happy to have a look into them). However, we have a fair idea of why Indian teachers take up teaching – 75% to 80% of teachers join teaching for three major reasons: want to work with children; a good work schedule, balancing work and home; and finally, a huge majority of teachers want to get into a government teaching job, which is why they stick around teaching in private schools or even as on-contract teachers in government schools.
So it would be fair to reason that teachers who did not spend time with students or teachers who were expected to work beyond the working hours of the school could feel unfulfilled, and this resentment may lead them to quitting. Also, the lack of possibility of a contractual position turning into a permanent position could also lead to contractual teachers leaving.
The entire thought process for this newsletter edition started with a newspaper article which was an opinion piece. There was sharp critique and support of this newspaper article based on people’s opinion. Now most of these people have worked in Indian education for a long time in different roles, and yet the entire debate was based on opinion. This leads us to say two things in conclusion – Firstly, the opinions of experienced experts in a field is usually based on data, and there needs to be sharing of this data. How do we know what the problems are if data on teacher issues are locked up inside organisations?
Secondly, there is a lot more data that can be collected, especially on teachers. Data collection in Indian education right now is focused on student attendance, student performance and school infrastructure. We think there is a step missing – we are not sure what the teachers’ expertise or experience is. We have questions like: What is the teacher doing in the classroom? What pedagogical approach is the teacher following? Is the teacher experienced in classroom management or not? Is the teacher checking on students’ progress from time to time?
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Edition: 4.43
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