Education Endowment Foundation:Evaluating a nine-day working fortnight as a strategy to improve teacher retention – School Choices

Evaluating a nine-day working fortnight as a strategy to improve teacher retention – School Choices

Project info

Independent Evaluator

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Ambition Institute

The aim of this evaluation is to explore whether moving to a nine-day working fortnight for teachers improves their recruitment and retention. Moving to a nine-day working fortnight involves changing teachers’ contractual working hours to give them one extra day off per fortnight.

This study is a School Choices’ project. School leaders make choices about school-wide practices and approaches that are intended to produce positive outcomes for pupils, such as how to organise the school day or communicate with families. However, many school-level practices have limited or no evidence for them, which means leaders must make decisions using other information. The aim of School Choices research is to produce causal evidence about the impact of different school-level approaches and policies on outcomes of interest, with particular attention to impact on pupils from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds.

School Choices evaluations are divided into two phases: a scoping phase, and an impact evaluation phase. During the scoping phase, the research teams will refine their research questions, verify their assumptions, and explore the feasibility of their evaluation designs

Teachers have an important influence on pupils’ educational achievement and earnings in later life. However, England faces a worsening shortage of qualified secondary teachers, particularly in STEM subjects. In large part, this shortage reflects declining rates of retention among early-career teachers and female teachers in their early thirties.

There is a widespread perception among teachers and school leaders that increasing the availability of flexible working (‘arrangements which allow employees to vary the amount, timing, or location of their work’) could improve teacher retention. However, there is currently an absence of evidence that increasing flexibility improves teacher recruitment or retention. This project will help to fill this gap in the evidence base by researching the move to a nine-day working fortnight for teachers.

This project is currently at the scoping phase. The aim of the scoping phase is to assess the feasibility of designing an impact evaluation that can produce causal evidence about the impact of moving to a nine-day working fortnight. The scoping phase will:

  • Explore in which schools it is feasible to implement a nine-day working fortnight
  • Identify costs involved for schools to move to a nine-day working fortnight
  • Explore challenges and lessons learned by schools that have adopted a nine-day working fortnight
  • Identify if the necessary data is available to causally assess the impact of a nine-day working fortnight

The scoping phase primarily investigates experiences from Dixons Academies Trust, who are implementing a nine-day working fortnight in all 17 of their schools from September 2024.

The scoping phase will be completed in Spring 2025. Once the scoping phase is finalised, this web page will be updated.