Ask any owner why good teachers leave schools and the first answer is salary. It is a comfortable answer
because it is partly true and entirely out of the owner’s hands: the school across the road pays two thousand
more, what can one do. But sit with the teachers who actually resigned — the ones the principal called “one
of our strongest” — and salary is rarely the reason they give when they are being honest. They leave because
being good at the job stopped making the job possible. This piece is about the six reasons behind that
sentence, and about the signals a school could have tracked long before the resignation letter.
“Being good at my job doesn’t make it easy anymore” — the film
The Nobody Noticed film that principals find hardest to watch is the one about Sonia. She is twenty-nine, and
she is packing her desk. Not angrily; carefully, the way you pack something you still care about. “I love the
students,” she says, “but I don’t think I can keep doing this.” The principal, who has walked in to try one more
time, says what every principal says: “You’re one of our strongest teachers.” And Sonia gives the answer that
the whole film is built around. “Because being good at my job doesn’t mean the job is easy anymore.”
That line is the whole problem in one sentence. Schools reward good teachers with more: the extra section,
the exam committee, the substitution, the parent who will only speak to her, the board batch because she
gets results. Each is a compliment. Together they are a load nobody has counted, sitting on the one person
least likely to complain. There is no villain in the film. There is a school that liked her so much it used her up.
The 20-minute handover: what walks out with a teacher
At the end of the film there is a handover. It takes twenty minutes. Two years of knowing every child in three
sections — which boy goes quiet before a test, which girl’s parents are separating, which group cannot sit
together, who needs the question read twice — is compressed into a register, a marks file and a few lines
about the syllabus covered. Then a student at the door asks, “Ma’am, you’re coming tomorrow?”
Owners think of attrition as a recruitment cost: the advertisement, the interviews, the month with a
substitute. The bigger cost is invisible: the knowledge that was never written anywhere because the school
had nowhere to write it, and the parents who quietly recalculate their confidence when the class teacher
changes in November. In a school that runs on memory, the memory leaves with the person.
Six reasons
The voiceover at the end of the film names them. Retention, it says, is workload, recognition, growth,
leadership, respect, support, and feeling the work matters. Here they are as a management would experience
them.
Workload
Not the number of periods on the official timetable, which usually looks reasonable, but the real total:
periods plus substitutions plus marking plus the diary plus the WhatsApp group plus the report cards typed
at home. The strongest teachers carry a disproportionate share because they are reliable, and reliability is invisible
until it breaks. A school that cannot see who took how many substitute periods this month cannot
see the problem, and the teacher does not raise it because raising it feels like admitting she cannot cope.
Recognition
Teachers do not need trophies. They need someone in authority to have noticed a specific thing they did. The
Teacher’s Day rose goes to everyone, which is the same as going to no one. The public praise, meanwhile,
often goes to the teacher whose section topped the board exam, which is not always the teacher who did the
hardest work. When recognition is generic or misdirected for long enough, a good teacher concludes that
nobody is watching, and once she believes that, the school across the road only needs to be slightly better.
Growth
A teacher who is excellent at twenty-nine will ask what she will be at thirty-five. In most private schools the
honest answer is: the same, with a slightly higher salary, until a coordinator’s post opens up. There is no
structured training beyond the annual workshop, no path that is not administrative, no way to get better at
teaching itself and be seen to. NEP 2020’s expectation of fifty hours of continuous professional development
a year is, read from the teacher’s side, a promise of growth. Schools that treat it as a compliance number
miss the point entirely.
Leadership
Teachers do not leave schools; they leave the way the school is led. A principal who is besieged — trustee
wanting admissions, parent wanting guarantees, forty unanswered messages — cannot lead in the way
teachers need, which is by being available for the difficult conversation. In another film in the series, a
teacher stands at the staff-room door, sees the principal’s face and decides not to bother her today. That
teacher had something to say. She will say it in her resignation.
Respect
A parent shouts at a teacher in the corridor. What happens next decides more about retention than the salary
structure. If management’s instinct is to placate the parent — “just apologise, it’s a big family” — the teacher
learns her position. Respect also shows in small things: whether teachers are told about a change before
parents are, whether the timetable is made with them or handed to them, whether a Punjabi-medium teacher
is treated as the equal of the English-medium one.
Support
Support is not a motivational message in the group. It is a counsellor the teacher can talk to confidentially
when a child’s situation weighs on her. It is a fair substitution rule so that absence does not always land on
the same three people. It is a leave balance she can actually see and actually use. It is somebody in
management noticing that she has not taken a day off in a term and asking why, rather than being grateful.
Early signals a principal can actually track
None of the six reasons announce themselves, but each leaves a trace a principal can see months in advance.
Substitution counts are the first. If the same four names appear on every substitute list, workload is already
unfair, and those four know it. Leave patterns are the second: a strong teacher who has taken no leave in two
terms is not necessarily dedicated; she may be unable to, or afraid to. Third, look at who is on every
committee — exam, discipline, annual day, admissions — and whether it is the same people. Fourth, watch
the direction of parent complaints; a teacher who begins to attract complaints she never attracted before is
usually tired, not suddenly worse. Fifth, count the training hours per teacher and see whose are zero. And
sixth, simply ask, in a way that can be answered honestly: a short, anonymous, termly check-in with three
questions is worth more than an annual appraisal.
A school with attendance, leave balances and substitution in one place can read all of this in ten minutes a
month. A school with registers reads none of it until it is too late.
What CENTA-trained schools do differently
Schools that put their teachers through live CENTA training — structured work on planning, classroom
practice, assessment and their own growth — tend to keep them, and the reason is not the certificate. It is
that training changes the conversation between a teacher and her school. She is no longer just being asked
for output; she is being invested in. Her fifty hours are logged, so the growth is visible. Her lesson plans are
shared, so her workload becomes something colleagues can see and share. Her assessment gets sharper, so
her results improve for reasons she can explain, which is what recognition should be built on.
Schooljinn runs this training live, in English, Hindi or Punjabi, alongside counsellors who are there for
teachers as much as for children. But the practice is open to any school: treat your best teachers as an asset
to grow rather than a resource to use, count what you ask of them, and make sure someone notices when
they are carrying too much.
Frequently asked questions
How high is teacher attrition in private schools? There is no reliable published figure for private-school
teacher attrition across Punjab and Haryana, and we will not invent one. What principals on the Schooljinn
panel report is that the loss that hurts is concentrated: a school may keep most of its staff and still lose two of
its five strongest teachers in a year. Measure your own rate for teachers you would have fought to keep; that
number matters more than the overall one.
What does replacing a teacher cost? The visible cost is recruitment, notice-period gaps and the months a
new teacher takes to reach the standard of the one who left. The larger cost is the knowledge of individual
children that walks out in a twenty-minute handover, and the confidence parents lose when a class teacher
changes mid-year. In a board class, a mid-year change can show up directly in results. Count both when
deciding whether retention is worth investing in.
Run a free teacher-retention health check, and watch the full Nobody Noticed series. — Ten
questions about workload, recognition and support will tell you which of the six reasons your school is most
exposed to; Schooljinn will share the result with you and a panel principal who has fixed it before.
Wish Karo. Jinn Karo.
Wish: to know a teacher is struggling long before the resignation letter. Jo Hukum Mere Aaka. The Jinn is a team,
not a trick — software, CENTA trainers, 100+ counsellors and a panel of 200+ principals.
Schooljinn – India’s Intelligent School Companion · The Pillars of School Management