What causes teacher demotivation and how policymakers can address it: evidence from kindergartens of northern Ghana

Teacher demotivation – the gradual erosion of teachers’ motivational resources, work engagement, and psychological wellbeing over time has emerged as a central challenge for education systems globally. Evidence from a range of contexts demonstrates the scale of the problem. In England, nearly one in three early-career teachers have left the profession within five years. In the United States, annual teacher turnover runs at around 16% higher than nursing, higher than law enforcement, higher than pharmacy. These are not marginal losses. Teacher quality is the single most important school-based determinant of student learning. Persistent exposure to highly effective teachers has long-term consequences for university access, earnings, and adult outcomes.
High teacher turnover carries real costs: disrupted classrooms, lower student achievement, mounting recruitment expenditure, and serious psychological and financial damage to the teachers themselves. A study in Rwanda found that high rates of turnover led to at least 21% of teachers teaching in subjects for which they had no training.

New data for the Global Report on Teachers indicates that 44 million additional teachers are needed to achieve universal primary and secondary education by 2030. Shortages are widespread across the globe, with African nations needing 15 million more teachers, while higher-income countries face acute retention challenges.

Most teachers who leave probably once entered the profession with genuine commitment and hopes, so why did they leave? The question we are asking in our latest study is what does the job do to new teachers and when should we start paying attention.

What is the gap in our understanding?
Existing research documents strong associations between burnout and turnover, but no single theory has sufficiently captured the progression. What has been missing is a coherent framework, one that explores not just that teachers leave, but how the journey from initial enthusiasm to eventual exit unfolds, and where that journey intervention is most likely to matter.

A new Thrive working paper addresses precisely this gap. Drawing on established psychological theories and empirical evidence from diverse contexts, the authors present a Demotivation Framework that maps the progression from high motivation to burn out and exit across three distinct stages. The framework offers a comprehensive and time-sensitive lens for understanding how teachers’ motivation, wellbeing, and career decisions evolve over time.

Stage one: Self-efficacy and the beginning 
Before setting foot in a classroom, prospective teachers already carry a motivational profile – a set of beliefs about what teaching will be like, how well they expect to cope, and what they hope to get out of a career in education. The framework shows that pre-service expectations, self-efficacy beliefs, and stress tolerance thresholds shape how vulnerable or resilient a teacher will later be to demotivation.
Trainees’ expectations and coping beliefs are updated while training, but the evidence suggests that early-career support remains insufficient in most systems, particularly for novice teachers navigating their first classrooms alone. The seeds of burnout, in many cases, are sown early on.

Stage two: The job in practice
Once in post, teachers face the daily interplay of job demands and job resources. Job demands include obvious factors such as large class sizes, disruptive behaviour, heavy administrative workloads and low pay, but also the less visible continuous emotional labour of managing one’s own feelings to maintain a functional classroom.

Teachers routinely suppress frustration, perform calmly under pressure, and absorb the emotional weight of their students’ behaviour in class. When this emotional regulation takes the form of surface acting (suppressing feelings without processing them) burnout risk rises sharply. When it takes the form of ‘deep acting (genuinely engaging with and transforming emotional responses) –teachers tend to fare better. The distinction matters, and it is shaped significantly by workplace conditions. Job resources such as supportive leadership, autonomy, professional development, clear roles, and constructive feedback buffer against these demands. When resources are sufficient, teachers can sustain engagement even under pressure. When they are not, repeated motivational shocks accumulate. Engagement erodes and exhaustion sets in.

This is the stage where most burnout occurs: the cumulative outcome of repeated motivational shocks, unmet psychological needs, declining self-efficacy, and insufficient workplace support.

Stage three: The long-term calculation
Stage three is where teachers begin weighing the expected costs and benefits of staying in teaching or moving within the education system against those of leaving it altogether. Several factors push towards exit: limited career progression, weak or opaque promotion structures, and the availability of more attractive alternatives elsewhere. When teachers see no clear path forward, no recognition, no growth, no improvement in conditions on the horizon — the expected value of staying declines, even if the day-to-day work still holds meaning. However, where outside options are scarce, the dynamics are different. Demotivated teachers may remain in post despite low wellbeing and reduced engagement, with consequences both for their own health and for the quality of education their students receive.

What the evidence from Ghana shows
The framework is not merely theoretical. A companion study applies it to survey data from 330 kindergarten teachers in northern Ghana – a context where the Ghanaian Ministry of Education has itself identified teacher retention as a critical barrier to improving child development outcomes.
The findings track the framework’s logic closely. In Stage two, the transition into low-resource classrooms, high student-to-teacher ratios, limited materials, and frequent linguistic or cultural mismatches between teachers and the communities they serve. Together, these constitute a sharp early shock to motivation.

Stage three tells a pointed story about career structure. Around 30% of teachers identified moving to primary or secondary level as their preferred alternative not leaving education entirely but moving up and out of kindergarten. This is consistent with Ministry of Education concerns that the absence of upward mobility is a key driver of turnover at the early childhood level. Teachers are not abandoning the profession; they are leaving a tier that offers no progression.

What policymakers can do
When experienced, committed teachers leave, it affects instructional quality, school functioning, and student learning trajectories and the costs extend further: disruptions to school organisation, expenditure on recruitment and training, and substantial psychological and financial costs borne by teachers themselves.
The Demotivation Framework gives policymakers a structured, evidence-based map of how teacher motivation erodes across three stages, and a set of clear questions about where to intervene. By addressing the factors that undermine motivation, whether through reducing job demands, enhancing job resources, or expanding meaningful opportunities for career advancement, education systems can better support teachers, reduce turnover, and ultimately improve learning outcomes for students.

Read the full paper here.