CURBING EARLY-CAREER TEACHER ATTRITION - A PAN-CANADIAN DOCUMENT ANALYSIS OF TEACHER INDUCTION AND MENTORSHIP PROGRAMS

Oct 15, 2026

Explores why early-career teachers abandon the profession by analyzing pan-Canadian documents on teacher induction and mentorship. Focuses on how induction programs are organized and mandated across jurisdictions, how mentorship functions within induction, and what school administrators are required to do in induction and mentorship processes. Situates the study within evidence that attrition is widespread internationally and that Canadian statistics and research remain inconsistent and incomplete, affecting policymakers’ ability to compare regional support strategies.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages42

Reading Time1 h 46 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Review of the Literature

Teacher Attrition

CURBING EARLY-CAREER TEACHER ATTRITION: A PAN-CANADIAN DOCUMENT ANALYSIS OF TEACHER INDUCTION AND MENTORSHIP PROGRAMS Benjamin Kutsyuruba, Lorraine Godden, and Leigha Tregunna, Queen’s University Over the past two decades, the phenomenon of teachers abandoning the profession has been noted internationally, and has increasingly caught the attention of policy makers and educational leaders. Despite this awareness, no pan-Canadian statistics or comprehensive reviews are available. This paper reports on the exploratory, pan-Canadian document analysis study that examined a) the organization and mandates of teacher induction programs in each jurisdiction; b) the role of mentorship as an aspect of teacher induction programs; and c) the mandated roles, duties, and responsibilities of school administrators in teacher induction and mentorship processes in each jurisdiction. Introduction As teachers’ quality and abilities are the most significant school-based factors contributing to student achievement and educational improvement (Cochran-Smith, 2006; Darling-Hammond, 2006; Rivkin, Hanushek, & Kain, 2005), much attention is given to the development of novice teachers. Adding to the importance of the focus on new teachers is the phenomenon that many new and beginning teachers, feeling depressed and discouraged, choose to abandon the profession (Boreen, Johnson, Niday, & Potts, 2009), with the most talented beginning teachers among those most apt to leave (Colb, 2001) . Despite financial assistance to enable teaching careers, the majority of teachers choose to leave the profession within two to five years and in some extreme cases even drop out even before the end of their first year (Black, 2001) . Teacher attrition crosses international borders: the United Kingdom (Smithers & Robinson, 2003), Australia (Stoel & Thant, 2002), the United States (Darling-Hammond, 2001; Ingersoll & Smith, 2003; Smith & Ingersoll, 2004), and other countries (OECD, 2005) . Internationally, it is argued that the first three to four years following initial training are crucial for teachers’ decisions about remaining in the profession (Jones, 2003) . Despite the persistence of this phenomenon for almost two decades, recent panCanadian statistics are inconsistent and incomplete. Only 6 in 10 of the 1995 graduates from elementary and secondary teacher education degree programs in Canada were employed as fulltime teachers 5 years after graduation; almost one quarter of them never went into teaching at all (CTF, 2003) . In 2004, the estimated teacher turnover in Canada was approximately 30% in the first 5 years of service (CTF, 2004) . Some sectors ofthe teaching profession have significantly higher attrition rates (e.g., French Immersion or French as a Second Language teachers [Karsenti, Collin, Villeneuve, Dumouchel, & Roy, 2008]) . Furthermore, early-career attrition rates in some Canadian jurisdictions are very high (Clandinin et al., 2012; OCT, 2012) . In addition to the inconsistent statistical information of the pan-Canadian picture, there is also limited research on understanding the problem of early-career teacher attrition (Schaefer, Long,& Clandinin, 2012) . As education is a provincial/territorial responsibility in Canada, responses to attrition concerns tend to be regionally based, resulting in lessons learned from one jurisdiction being largely unavailable to other jurisdictions experiencing similar teacher attrition. Researchers, policymakers, and educational leaders need to understand how educational systems might assist in retaining teachers. Examination of pan-Canadian policies of support for new and beginning teachers can provide a comparative perspective of the variances in each region. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to report on the exploratory, pan-Canadian document analysis study (Kutsyuruba, Godden, & Tregunna, 2013) that examined a) the organization and mandates of teacher induction programs in each

FAQs

What problem does the study address?

The study addresses early-career teacher attrition and the decision of new and beginning teachers to leave the profession despite awareness of the issue internationally and limited Canadian evidence.

What does the pan-Canadian document analysis examine?

It examines the organization and mandates of teacher induction programs, the role of mentorship within those programs, and the mandated roles, duties, and responsibilities of school administrators across jurisdictions.

Why is pan-Canadian evidence considered limited in this work?

The paper reports that pan-Canadian statistics are inconsistent and incomplete and that research on understanding early-career teacher attrition remains limited, reducing the ability to compare lessons across regions.

Oct 15, 2026

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