Many teachers enter the profession full of motivation, only to find that the reality of the classroom is very different from what they were taught to expect.

Once teachers are settled in their role, marking, administration and lesson preparation leave little time for reflection. Even teachers who want to try something new may fall back on what they know when faced with the daily pressures of the job.

A shortage of teachers is an ongoing concern in countries around the world. In England, around a third of teachers at state schools leave within the first five years. Just over half of state secondary schools told the British Council’s Language Trends survey that recruiting qualified language teachers is a problem, and many respondents voiced concerns about the preparedness of trainees and early-career teachers.

In Spain, where I carried out my research, Unesco reports critical shortages in languages and vocational training among other subjects. Across Europe and North America, Unesco estimates that more than 90% of the teacher shortage is due to teachers leaving the profession.

I interviewed 23 secondary school English teachers in Spain for my doctorate, then 35 trainee and practising teachers for a British Council-funded study on teacher education and classroom readiness, observing lessons in both. What they told me suggests that their training prepares them mainly for the ideal classroom.

Trained for an unrealistic classroom

Trainees told me that they were being trained for a perfect classroom, and the content they are learning is often not helpful when dealing with disruptive classes. “I don’t think they really prepare you for the real world, for the real teaching world,” one said.

Most trainees agreed. One who already had some teaching experience explained: “If I don’t have any conflicts in class, I think I’m prepared.” Teachers who had finished the training said the same: “I learned the ideal case.”

Recently graduated teachers feel a shock when they arrive at their first class. One recalled that three or four students stood up and left the minute she entered the classroom: “Nobody prepared me for this, but I don’t blame them”.

Another teacher, who came to teaching later in life, put it more bluntly. “The first year was awful,” they said. “I couldn’t sleep … so, I said, I can’t do this.”

Many of the teachers in my studies attribute this shock to the lack of practice in their teacher training. Their one-year master’s degree focused on theoretical concepts they struggled to apply, and their expectations were left unfulfilled.

No one to ask

Support does not necessarily improve once teachers enter the profession. Only 15% of novice secondary teachers in Spain (up to five years’ experience) have an assigned mentor, compared with an average of 26% across the OECD countries in the survey.

The classrooms teachers enter are not always the ones they trained for, and teachers often feel lonely, stressed and demotivated. “I feel it is a very lonely profession,” one teacher said. That matters at a time when young people face growing pressures, as recent protests across Europe suggest. Teachers are expected to support teenagers through increasingly difficult circumstances, but who supports the teachers themselves?

Some begin to wonder whether to stay, contributing to recruitment and retention difficulties. An early-career teacher told me: “Last year, I really liked this job but these four months I thought about quitting this job like three times.”

Globally, young teachers leave the profession at higher rates than their more experienced colleagues. But it is not only newcomers who leave: in a Scottish study of mostly experienced teachers, over two-thirds of those who had left the profession were “reluctant leavers”, who left despite their commitment because conditions had become untenable. Sleep disorders, anxiety and exhaustion ran through their stories.

The problem, then, is not that teachers lack commitment or resilience. It is that they are entering a profession for which their training may not have adequately prepared them.

What teachers asked for

The trainees and teachers I talked to in my research asked for exposure to the classrooms sooner. They asked for practical help: more time in real classrooms, placements in more than one school, and training on managing behaviour and including students with different needs.

Other research in Spain points the same way. Trainees on a seven-month school programme, rather than the usual one-month placements, reported growing in confidence, and trainees who felt actively guided by their school mentor felt better able to manage a class. The OECD’s review of Catalonia agrees, calling for the way school placements are organised to be re-examined.

In my doctoral study, many experienced teachers in Spain asked for more training and more teaching support too, but most of the changes they proposed depend on institutions and governments. That means universities providing longer and more varied school placements, schools ensuring every new teacher has access to an experienced mentor, and governments funding the time and resources needed to make this possible.

Nobody can prepare a teacher for every classroom. But we can stop preparing them for one that does not exist, and let them practise in the real ones, with someone beside them and a little time to breathe.