Every time new figures on teacher attrition are released, we return to the same explanations: workload, behaviour, pay, stress and accountability.

These issues matter, but after researching teacher attrition in school settings, I have come to a different conclusion.

The real drivers of attrition sit higher up the system in failing external services, rising thresholds in special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and social care, and inclusion expectations that are impossible to meet.

Teachers overstretched

Teachers are not leaving because they lack resilience. They are leaving because the system has made it impossible to meet the needs placed upon them.

In my recent research - Inclusion Pressures on Teacher Attrition: the impact of rising SEND and SEMH needs in mainstream English schools - every participant identified emotional strain and workload pressures as significant factors affecting their wellbeing. The deeper story was not about time management or personal capacity.

It was about the volume and complexity of need that mainstream staff are expected to absorb without the specialist support or resource required.

More than 1.6 million children in England now have SEND, and the number with SEMH needs continues to rise. Specialist placements are full. Thresholds for education, health and care plans (EHCPs) have increased.

Social care services intervene only when children reach crisis. The predictable result is that children with complex needs who previously would have had multi-agency support are now in mainstream classrooms without matched provision.

Schools cannot say no. Inspection frameworks do not allow it. Parents expect and deserve support. Teachers do everything they can, and then carry the guilt when it is not enough.

‘Moral injury’

This moral injury is one of the most powerful drivers of attrition. Staff know what children need, but they cannot provide it.

They carry the emotional fallout of systemic failure daily. Participants in my research described feeling responsible for needs that no single teacher or school could meet.

Some became emotional during interviews because they cared deeply yet felt they were failing children through no fault of their own.

The accountability system disguises the real causes. Schools and leaders are often blamed for failing to meet needs, but they are operating within an inspection framework that demands inclusion while ignoring the resource gap beneath it.

I recently saw a parent publicly blame senior leadership for safeguarding failings involving her child, and this is not an isolated incident.

In reality, the school had not failed. The system had. Rising thresholds, delays and stretched external services meant the school was the final service left standing.

Wellbeing initiatives can’t solve this

Schools are the endpoint of a collapsing ecosystem, yet they carry the majority of the blame.

This flow of responsibility and guilt is damaging. Leaders absorb it. Teachers internalise it. Attrition increases.

Wellbeing initiatives are not the answer. Indeed, many teachers were offered wellbeing support but had no time to use it. “Counselling exists, but workload always wins.”

Staff in my study were clear that wellbeing improves only when workload becomes manageable, and workload only becomes manageable when need is resourced properly.

Flexible scheduling, smaller workloads, protected time, improved staffing and access to specialist support were consistently identified as the most meaningful interventions.

These are not optional extras. They are the conditions required for staff to do their jobs safely and sustainably.

Let’s be honest

We need an honest reframing of the situation. If we continue to treat attrition as individual fragility instead of systemic collapse, we will keep losing the people children rely on. The SEND and SEMH crisis is the retention crisis.

The rising thresholds in social care and SEND are the workload crisis. The inspection regime that forces schools to accept unmet needs is the behaviour crisis.

Teachers are not walking away because they cannot cope. They are walking away because the system is asking them to meet needs that no school could meet alone.

If we want to improve teacher retention, we must begin with the true roots of the problem: rising unmet need, collapsing external services, and a system that places responsibility without the authority or resource to match it.

Until that changes, wellbeing initiatives will not slow the loss.

Gina Saggers is a former primary safeguarding and inclusion lead who now works as a youth work degree apprenticeship tutor

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