Is a lack of support forcing dads out of teaching?

When Thomas Michael’s first child was born, he wasn’t eligible for paid parental leave.

Current legislation says you must work at a school continuously for at least 26 weeks to qualify for the statutory paternity pay (of up to two weeks’ paid leave at £194 per week) and he hadn’t been in his job for long enough.

He explained when he joined that his wife was heavily pregnant and his new bosses offered him two weeks’ paid leave anyway. But it was their discretionary generosity, rather than policy, that got him this time to be with his wife and child after a traumatic birth and five days in the neonatal intensive care unit.

Michael’s positive experience is, unfortunately, not always replicated across the sector.

As the Department for Education pushes ahead with improved maternity pay and expanded flexible working for mothers in a move to improve teacher retention, some have questioned whether enough thought has been spared for what support should - or could - look like for dads who work in schools.

“There’s definitely an invisible dad demographic,” says Emma Sheppard, founder of The Maternity Teacher Paternity Teacher (MTPT) Project, a charity for teacher-parents. “The government talks about wanting to improve things for parents, but really ‘parents’ means mums.”

New fathers leaving teaching

MTPT analysis of DfE data shows that on average 15,034 teachers and teaching assistants begin a period of maternity or paternity leave every year, and of those, only a fraction of fathers take anything beyond the two-week minimum.

What’s more, a 2026 MTPT report, drawing on freedom of information requests to the DfE, tracked attrition among four groups of school staff over the four years after maternity or paternity leave: teachers returning from maternity leave, teaching assistants returning from maternity leave, teachers returning from standard paternity leave (one to two weeks) and teachers returning from extended paternity leave (three weeks or more).

Across all four groups combined, schools lost 5,456 staff (some 36 per cent of the original cohort) within four years of their return, with almost two-fifths of that loss happening in the first year.

Teachers returning from maternity leave remain the single highest-risk group, climbing from 18 per cent leaving after one year to 39 per cent after four.

But the second-highest attrition rate over a three-year period belongs to teachers who took extended paternity leave. Their attrition rate reaches 25 per cent by the three-year mark. Standard two-week paternity leave, by contrast, carries the lowest attrition rate of any of the four groups.

This data isn’t split by gender, so a small minority of extended paternity leave-takers will be mothers in same-sex couples, but the group is overwhelmingly likely to be fathers, which makes the pattern striking.

As the MTPT report puts it, it seems that the conflict between parenting and working in schools is not simply gendered but depends on who takes on the caring role within the first 12 months of their child’s life. Whatever their gender, those who take on the caring role appear to suffer what is known as the “motherhood penalty” - marked by lack of career development, lost earning potential and lost professional opportunities.

Adrian Bethune’s experience backs this up. When his first son was born in 2015, not long after he’d started a new senior leadership role at a school in Hertfordshire, he took a single week’s paternity leave, unpaid, as agreed with his headteacher.

Bethune and his wife have since made the decision to both work part-time as their family has grown, allowing them to spend more time as a family and not have to rely on breakfast and after-school clubs.

“Our kids are now at primary school, but as anyone who has kids at primary school knows, it’s really not conducive to working full-time,” explains Bethune. “It means we are earning less than we could do, but, on balance, that’s a choice we’re happy with.”

However, he continues, it is a choice that has also meant him stepping back from further leadership ambitions. “Lots of people have said to me, ‘Don’t you want to be a deputy head or a head?’” he says. “My immediate thought isn’t about Ofsted and the pressures, it’s that I wouldn’t be around for my kids. So no, it doesn’t appeal.”

Is it a given that taking an active role in family life is incompatible with a hands-on role in school? Not necessarily. Bethune’s school offers free wraparound childcare to staff, which has resulted in many of the teachers sending their own children there.

“That makes the job work so much better,” he says. “They’re not thinking, ‘God, I’ve got to go.’ They can be there for the nativity plays and the assemblies.”

Michael explains that his school treats family time as non-negotiable and “it’s not even up for debate”. When his wife needed a medical operation and two weeks in hospital, he explains, the school absorbed the disruption to his hours without question.

Meanwhile, Sheppard points to a handful of academy trusts and councils, including Prince Albert Community Trust in Birmingham, The Charter School Education Trust in Lambeth and Southwark, and Hounslow local authority, which have equalised or improved paternity pay. But even where the offer exists, uptake is low.

“I will ask them for examples of staff who have taken the fully paid shared parental leave package, and they say that they don’t know anybody who has taken it yet,” she says.

Helping dads would help mums, too

It’s a very different picture elsewhere, explains Bernard Andrews, a father of three and a philosophy teacher at an English international school in Spain, where the statutory paternity entitlement is 16 weeks, fully paid - eight times the English offer.

“I didn’t feel any stigma from the school, they didn’t make me feel difficult at all,” he says. “I did feel like a liability though in some ways, because I’ve got exam groups. But I think that’s the point, isn’t it? Women have been made to feel like a liability for a long time, so it’s a good thing that I felt that way.”

And, he says, he has also experienced another gendered difference, around acknowledging just how tough those early days of parenthood can be.

“If I’m honest, I found it really hard,” he says. “It’s boring, just continually cleaning up crap. Your sense of self just disappears. But I found that a lot easier to say than my wife. There wasn’t the expectation that I would enjoy it, whereas there are different expectations on women.”

Sheppard frames this mismatch of expectations as an “upstream problem” - and thinks that addressing it could bring widespread benefits. “To improve things for men, and for women, in the workplace, you need to improve things for men at home,” she says.

Better paternity provision shouldn’t be seen as a nice-to-have alongside maternity reform, she continues, but a mechanism that could shift outcomes for women, too. 

More men taking on caring roles could mean more women staying in leadership, with the potential for knock-on effects across the sector, from the gender pay gap to classroom culture, she adds.

However, Bethune believes that in order to fix the imbalance, the sector would first need to address a broader problem around working culture.

“In England, compared to other countries, we do not value parental leave. We worship at the altar of work and salary and pay and status,” he says. 

Incremental improvements, he argues, will therefore not be enough on their own. “Even eight weeks’ maternity and four paternity is still not good enough. It’s just a drop in the ocean.”

Michael, however, puts the challenge in simpler terms: “We just need to match up a bit more with the reality of having a kid.”

That means providing leave that doesn’t split the same shortfall between two parents but that offers meaningful recognition of family needs. “Anything you can do just to extend that time together,” says Michael.

Perhaps most importantly, if the DfE is serious about making reforms for parents that will help with retention, the data suggests it shouldn’t be stopping at mums. 

The attrition figures for extended-paternity fathers tell a clear story: taking on caring responsibility, whoever does it, doesn’t fit with a system built around the assumption that teachers don’t have anyone else to look after.

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