grown stronger as a person—because being a single parent meant that she had to
push herself to become more organised in her personal life (Fig.3.2).
Alison felt that the current phase of her professional life was notably different
from the previous ones. Then, she had enjoyed the professional recognition that her
early promotions had brought about and gained immense satisfaction from her
rapidly growing sense of efficacy. However, at the beginning of this phase, she felt
unsettled and‘dithery’and could not help wondering what steps she ought to take
to advance her career path:‘Should I go or should I stay at this school?’;‘Is it time
for me to be looking for deputy headships?’. She went through an unsuccessful
period of seeking promotion. She now felt more‘settled’and content and was no
longer looking for further promotion within the school. She enjoyed leading a‘big
and exciting push’on literacy and knew that she would be teaching a new year
group the following year—another, different challenge ahead!
After 11 years of teaching, then, Alison continued to feel ‘engaged’ and
‘committed’. She felt that she had a‘new lease of life’, but understood that, if she
wanted to become a deputy head, she would have to leave her current school when
the right opportunity arose.
3.6 Veteran Teachers: Adaptation, Regeneration
and Hardiness
Throughout their professional lives these teachers will have been confronted by
professional, workplace and personal pressures and tensions which, at times at the
very least, are likely to have challenged and perhaps ultimately eroded their values,
beliefs and practices: for some, their willingness to remain in the job, and for others,
their capacity to continue to teach to their best in the classroom as commitment
becomes eroded.
There is a real sense, then, that physical retention, whilst important, is no more
so than the retention of teacher quality. At a time when the age profile of teachers in
many countries is skewed towards those with more than 20 years of experience, and
in which most of these would be unlikely to feel able to change career forfinancial
and domestic reasons, we believe that it is important, also, to investigate whether
the demands and challenge over time have dimmed these teachers’sense of
well-being and commitment and thus their capacity to teach to their best. We see
retention, therefore, as a process rather than a result. We know that these teachers
have survived to become veterans, but we know relatively little about the conditions
which have added to or diminished their sense of commitment and well-being, and
the relationship of these to their felt capacities to teach to their best. As teachers
grow older, so do the challenges of maintaining energy increase in the complex and
persistently challenging work of teaching children and young people, whose atti-
tudes, motivations and behaviours may differ widely from those with whom veteran
teacher began their careers. Moreover, teachers’own professional agendas may
3 Variations in the Conditions for Teachers’Professional... 47