Anyone who has followed the conversation about education over the past few years, months, or even weeks could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. The list of reasons to complain is long: teacher shortages, increasing workloads, administrative burdens, hard-to-fill vacancies, concerns about the profession’s public image, and, a few years ago, the impact of COVID. So far, there is nothing particularly new in this blog. But there is a catch.

Against that backdrop, you would expect teachers’ job satisfaction to have taken a significant hit in recent years.

A new study in Teaching and Teacher Education by Jelena Veletić and colleagues set out to examine exactly that question using data from four rounds of TALIS, the international survey of teachers and school leaders. In total, the study covers 49 education systems between 2008 and 2024. The results are remarkable, to say the least (and yes, that is a cliffhanger).

Internationally, average teacher job satisfaction increased slightly between 2008 and 2013 and then remained remarkably stable. Even after COVID-19, the researchers found no evidence of a general international decline. That does not mean every country followed the same pattern. Norway and Japan, for example, showed a downward trend. But the broader international picture is not one of continuous decline.

That is interesting because it runs counter to an assumption that often sits in the background of discussions about education. Many of the challenges facing education today are very real. Yet they do not appear to have translated automatically into a broad decline in teachers’ job satisfaction.

The researchers also examined which changes within schools coincided with changes in job satisfaction. Several patterns emerged. As bullying increased and staff shortages worsened, teacher job satisfaction tended to decline. In contrast, greater shared decision-making and stronger teacher-student relationships went hand in hand with higher levels of satisfaction. When the researchers considered all factors simultaneously, one stood out above the rest: the quality of relationships between teachers and students.

That is perhaps less surprising than it might seem at first. Teaching is, ultimately, a relational profession. Salary, workload, policy, and organisational factors all matter. But for many teachers, the meaning of their work still lies in their daily interactions with students. The authors point to research showing that teachers, just like students, need positive relationships and a sense of connectedness.

At the same time, there are a few important nuances.

The first is that the study does not measure workload, stress, or well-being. It measures overall job satisfaction. Those concepts are related, but they are not the same thing. It is entirely possible to be satisfied with your profession while also feeling that the conditions under which you work have become more difficult.

The second nuance is perhaps even more important. TALIS only surveys teachers who are still working in the profession. Those who have already left teaching are no longer part of the sample. The authors explicitly acknowledge this limitation. Stable levels of satisfaction among practising teachers do not automatically mean that there is no attrition problem.

That said, this does not mean we should dismiss the findings. The study does not suggest that everything is fine in education. Nor does it suggest that teacher shortages do not exist or that workload is not a concern. What it does suggest is that the often-heard narrative of a general and ongoing collapse in teachers’ job satisfaction finds little support in these international data.