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Schools across the US are facing a major teacher shortage with both a lack of new recruits and high numbers quitting the profession combining to cause severe problems, a major new report has found.

Between 2009 and 2014, enrollments in teacher training courses fell from 691,000 to 451,000, a drop of 35 per cent, according to the study from the Learning Policy Institute.

According to modelling by the authors, 2016 will have the lowest number of available new teachers in a decade.

“High levels of attrition, estimated to be nearly eight per cent of the workforce annually, are responsible for the largest share of annual demand,” it says.

“The teaching workforce continues to be a leaky bucket, losing hundreds of thousands of teachers a year - the majority of them before retirement age. Changing attrition would change the projected shortages more than any other single factor.”

There are regional variations in attrition rates - with the southern states suffering more than other parts of the country and cities faring worse than rural areas.

The study compares the numbers of teachers quitting the profession in the US to high-achieving countries such as Finland, Singapore and Ontario, Canada, where only 3 - 4 per cent of teachers leave each year, compared to the 8 per cent in America.

The problems comes as demand for teachers is increasing.  Recent data shows that demand rose after the recession, reaching 260,000 new teachers a year in 2014.

“Projections show a large increase in 2017/18 and a projected plateau bringing annual hires demanded to approximately 300,000 teachers a year,” according to the report, called A Coming Crisis in Teaching? Teacher Supply, Demand and Shortages in the US.

The extra demand stems from a growing student population, with the National Center for Education Statistics predicting an extra 3 million students in the next decade.

A number of school districts are also trying to reduce class sizes and reintroduce programs that were cut during the recession, the report notes.

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