Exploring teacher persistence and agency in diverse and challenging schools

12 March 2026

Together, the universities of Edinburgh, Liverpool John Moores and St. Mary's University College are carrying out a study entitled: Exploring teacher persistence and agency in diverse and challenging schools.

There is a lot of concern over the difficulty in retaining teachers in the profession both in the UK and internationally. We are interested in finding out more about this important issue to help inform future strategies to encourage teachers to stay in the profession. Usually, research in this area focuses on why teachers leave but our research is interested in why teachers might stay, especially when faced with diverse and/or challenging contexts. Our aim is to talk to Early Career teachers (1-5 years) and more experienced teachers (6 years +) through interview and focus group activity to help us understand why they persist in the profession and how they engage with the challenges of diverse environments and communities.

We are looking to recruit practising teachers working in a diverse and/or challenging school context. We are concerned with environments which may have different kinds of challenges. These may include high levels of Free School Meal entitlement, multi-lingual (including indigenous languages such as Scots Gaelic, Irish, Irish Gaelic), rural/urban, in Areas of Multiple Deprivation etc. Teachers themselves should decide if they feel their school represents a diverse and/or challenging one from their perspective and experience.

Our study is being carried out in three jurisdictions: Scotland, England, and Northern Ireland and so in three education systems. This Project has received a favourable ethics opinion from an Edinburgh University Research Ethics Committee and has been funded by the Moray Endowment Foundation.

We would be grateful if you would support this research by forwarding this embedded message to members/ colleagues within your networks / organisations.

If you forward the message to your networks, please could download the message embedded above and send as a document attachment rather than a link. If there are any issues, accessing the document, contact g.peiser@ljmu.ac.uk

With many thanks for your support in advance,

Dr Lorna Hamilton (University of Edinburgh), Dr Gillian Peiser (LJMU), Prof Martin Hagan (St Mary’s University College)