Last week, I already had several journalists on the phone, and one of the topics that came up was the teacher shortage. It is a problem that may become somewhat less severe in the coming years due to demographic changes. But take it from me: the shortage is still causing major headaches for many schools (and school leaders). And this remains a worldwide challenge. Which is why education systems are often looking for new ways to get people into the classroom more quickly. Think of alternative certification routes and other shortened pathways into teaching.

This is understandable. If you do not have enough teachers, you do not want to make entering the profession unnecessarily difficult. But there may be a catch…

A new US study by Shuai Li examined beginning teachers who entered the profession either through traditional teacher education or an alternative route. The researcher used several large, nationally representative US datasets.

What did the study find? Teachers who entered through an alternative route felt significantly less prepared for the job when they started. This is perhaps not entirely surprising. The pattern also appeared across different cohorts. And, to be clear, this was not about some vague feeling of insecurity, but about quite concrete things such as classroom management and differentiation. Things many beginning teachers struggle with, but this group struggles with even more.

And then comes the next step. Feeling insufficiently prepared was associated with a stronger intention to move to another school or, and this will probably sound familiar, even to leave teaching altogether. It is important to realise that the certification route itself did not directly predict these intentions to leave. The association ran through how prepared teachers felt.

And what happened when the researchers checked back with a smaller group of teachers one year later to see whether those intentions had become reality? Quite often, they had. Earlier intentions predicted both actually moving to another school and actually leaving teaching.

Still, some caution is needed here. The study could not show that teachers from alternative routes were significantly more likely to have left the profession one year later. Moreover, this is observational research, and the feeling of being prepared is based on self-report. So we cannot simply conclude that a shorter teacher education program causes people to feel less prepared and that this, in turn, causes them to leave, although the study does point in that direction.

And that possibility is worth paying attention to. As a response to a teacher shortage, getting people into the classroom faster sounds logical. But getting teachers into the classroom faster should not mean getting them into the classroom less prepared.