Abstract
Teachers are a key component of any education system. Any attempts to improve the quality of education must start with building a quality, stable and sufficiently robust teacher base.
However, this represents a huge challenge for many economies, as many countries are currently struggling with a shortage of quality teachers, mainly because many teachers leave profession. This puts pressure on policymakers and researchers to understand the teacher labour market and find appropriate mechanisms to retain quality teachers.
This text identifies the reasons that lead teachers to leave their profession through a systematic literature review based on the analysis of 69 international studies published in journals indexed by the Web of Science. An almost endless list of potential risk and protective factors were mentioned in the studies, the salience of which may vary in different cultural contexts.
Only thorough knowledge of the local context can determine which set of research-driven policies is the most appropriate for a given state, locality, or school.