Who becomes a teacher and why?

Abstract This paper reports on a comprehensive review of international evidence, synthesising the findings of some of the strongest empirical work on the main factors influencing people's decisions to be teachers or not. Four search engines, including Google and Google Scholar and five electronic databases identified 517 studies of which 212 were included in this narrative synthesis. These studies highlighted three main motivating factors: intrinsic, altruistic and extrinsic, although the order of the ranking varies with subjects, phase of education and gender of teachers. In general, these studies reported that women are more likely to report being motivated by intrinsic and altruistic reasons, while men are more likely to cite extrinsic reasons. Across all cultures, men are reported to be more strongly influenced by social norms and expectations and were less likely to choose primary and early years teaching. Women are also more likely to experience higher levels of career satisfaction and less social dissuasion than men. Research on motivation to teach is also often focused only on those who have already made the decision to teach. Therefore, policies based on these studies might only be attracting those who are already persuaded. This paper argues that to improve recruitment of under‐represented groups (e.g., males and STEM subject graduates), attention should instead be on those who might otherwise have gone into teaching, but have not. For this group, the review found that it is the status of the profession, the working environment and salary over the long term that are important. Context and implications Rationale for the study The widespread shortage of teachers is a global concern. There are particular challenges in attracting and retaining men, STEM subject teachers and ethnic minority groups to teaching. There is currently no systematic synthesis of international evidence on how to get under‐represented groups into teaching. Why the findings matter Our findings matter because recruitment and retention of teachers is a pressing issue facing many countries. Our review considers a much more comprehensive range of factors than previous research. We weight the strength of evidence of each study so that policies to address shortages of under‐represented groups are based on the strongest evidence. Implications for policy makers Our review found that the strongest determinants of who go into teaching or not are the individuals' sociological background and choice of subject at school. Therefore, policies to attract more into teaching should focus on those who are still in school. For men and STEM subject graduates, extrinsic factors (status, prestige and working conditions) matter. Therefore, policies to recruit under‐represented groups should focus on these factors. Most previous research on this topic excludes non‐teachers, resulting in misleading results. This has implications for future research and government policies. Policies to attract people into teaching should consider the career drivers of those who might have otherwise gone into teaching, but did not.