Who Aspires to Become a Teacher? Findings from a Cohort Study Tracking Young People from Age 10/11 to Age 21/22

Abstract

Against a backdrop of severe and long-standing teacher shortages, in this paper we present analyses of over 60,000 survey responses collected via a cross-sectional cohort study that sampled young people in England over a period of 11 years; at ages 10/11, 12/13, 13/14, 15/16, 17/18, and 21/22. These methods allow us to explore how common teaching aspirations are amongst young people at different ages, and who aspires to become a teacher as a future career. Analysing both free-text and Likert-scale data, we find that many more young people express an interest in becoming a teacher than is reflected in teacher recruitment data, and that teaching aspirations are patterned by gender and ethnicity. Girls and young women, as well as young people who identified as White, were significantly more likely to be open to teaching than their peers. Our findings suggest that teaching is a common back-up, or second-choice career aspiration, and that many individuals who report an earlier interest in teaching do not go on to become teachers. We end the paper with reflections on how these findings might be used to increase and diversify teacher recruitment, as well as recommendations for future research.

1. Why Examine Young People’s Teaching Aspirations?

Although there is no single definition of what constitutes a ‘teacher shortage’ (Craig et al., 2023; Gorard et al., 2025; See et al., 2023), in many countries not enough people become teachers (Nguyen et al., 2022; OECD, 2005, 2018, 2024; UNESCO, 2016). In England, the focus of this study, teacher shortages are both long-standing and severe. In the eight years between 2015/16 and 2023/24, postgraduate teacher recruitment targets set by the Department for Education (DfE: the government department responsible for education) were only met once (Maisuria et al., 2023). In 2024/25 postgraduate teacher recruitment was 31% below target in England, meaning that over 10,000 of the new teachers estimated to be needed did not join the profession (McLean & Worth, 2025).

The severity of these teacher shortages differs between schools and regions. Echoing findings from the US (Goldhaber et al., 2025), more secondary schools than primary schools in England report experiencing teacher shortages (Worth & Faulkner-Ellis, 2022), as do schools serving disadvantaged communities (Allen et al., 2020). Teacher shortages also fluctuate according to teaching specialisms and social inequities (OECD, 2018). For example, in 2024/25 just 61% of the new science teachers needed in England were recruited (McLean & Worth, 2025). There is also a lack of diversity within the profession, especially with regard to gender and ethnicity. Across all subject areas, the vast majority of entrants into postgraduate teaching courses identify as women, and as White (DfE, 2024a). Not only do these uneven teacher shortages put additional pressure on the existing school workforce (Castro, 2023; Savill-Smith & Scanlan, 2022), but they have been shown to have adverse consequences for student learning and outcomes (e.g., Gibbons et al., 2018; Goldhaber et al., 2019; Jerrim & Sims, 2019).

As a result of these teacher shortages, understanding teacher recruitment patterns (i.e., why are some people interested in becoming teachers whilst others are not?) is a key policy concern. Although it has been argued that a more diverse teacher workforce could help to tackle wider social issues such as racism and misogyny (Glowach et al., 2023; Turner, 2025), policy efforts in England to date have focused on increasing the size of the teacher workforce, rather than diversifying the demographics of that workforce (e.g., DfE, 2019; House of Commons Education Committee, 2024; The Labour Party, 2024). We here acknowledge that some arguments for diversifying the teacher workforce can be based upon stereotypical generalisations about, for instance, women teachers (Skelton, 2012) or Black teachers (Pabon, 2016). Yet we recognise that, to sustainably improve teacher shortages, we must not only focus on increasing teacher numbers but also on increasing diversity in the teacher workforce (Demie & See, 2023; Goldhaber et al., 2019; Kotonya et al., 2025). In this paper we take a social justice approach to these issues, meaning that we understand that there are social and systemic barriers which may prevent some people from teaching and aspiring to teach. Indeed, there is evidence that teachers and teacher applicants from Minoritised Ethnicities are more likely to experience discrimination in the form of racism and differential expectations (Haque & Elliott, 2019; Bradbury et al., 2022; Worth et al., 2022), and that this discrimation may impact teacher supply (Kotonya et al., 2025; Worth et al., 2022).

This paper presents analyses of the teaching aspirations reported by over 60,000 survey responses from young people in England. We define ‘teaching aspirations’ as where a young person has reported an interest, desire, or ambition to pursue a career in primary or secondary school teaching when they are older. Importantly, we acknowledge that the aspirations examined here, like all aspirations, vary considerably in terms of strength, stability, or ‘seriousness’. We do not claim that these teaching aspirations are concrete measures that can predict whether or not a young person will ultimately become a teacher. Indeed, we know from previous studies that this is not the case (e.g., Sikora, 2021). Instead, we consider aspirations as useful indicators of potential interest in becoming a teacher. This is because each aspiration expressed is accompanied by some degree of identity work to be recognised as a certain type of person (Gee, 2000); by stating that they would like to become a teacher, an individual starts to envision their possible future teacher self (Markus & Nurius, 1986). In this approach, we are informed by conceptual understandings of aspirations as social phenomena that are shaped by our cultural and historical contexts (Archer & DeWitt, 2017; Gutman & Akerman, 2008; Quaglia & Cobb, 1996). Our aspirations do not appear spontaneously, but draw from the experiences and ideals of the people around us (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; Ray, 2006). Exploring teaching aspirations at a time of teacher shortages can thus help us to understand the social norms and assumptions surrounding teaching, and provide evidence of whether young people see themselves as possible future teachers. In taking a quantitative approach to this issue our aim is not to explore the reasons why young people do (or do not) aspire to teach, as others have sought to do (Gorard et al., 2021; Kyriacou & Coulthard, 2000; See, 2004). Rather, we intend to develop a deeper contextual understanding of what leads to persistent and patterned teacher shortages. This study was guided by the following research questions: (1) How common are teaching aspirations amongst young people? (RQ1), and (2) Who aspires to become a teacher? (RQ2).

2. Scholarly Research into Young People’s Teaching Aspirations

Most existing research focussed on understanding teacher recruitment has examined teaching motivations retrospectively, as reported by preservice and in-service teachers (e.g., Heinz, 2015; See et al., 2022; Watt et al., 2017). In contrast, there have been relatively few studies considering who wants to become a teacher when they are older (Gore et al., 2015). Yet wider research with young people suggests that teaching is a popular future career aspiration. Teaching is often amongst the top aspirations listed by young people and students in the UK (e.g., Chambers et al., 2018; Croll, 2008; Platt & Parsons, 2018), as well as in other countries including Australia (Gore et al., 2017) and the US (Marder et al., 2017).

The known studies which have tracked young people’s aspirations to teach over time all indicate that having a teaching aspiration in school is not predictive of becoming a teacher in early adulthood. In their analysis of general careers aspirations data from the British Household Panel Survey, for example, Croll (2008) found that only 4% of respondents who were working when they were interviewed between the ages of 20 and 25 were teachers, even though 8% of respondents had expressed an aspiration to teach when they were aged 15. Similarly, in their teaching-specific study of 4509 young people in the US, Hanushek and Pace (1995) found that only 22% of those who aspired to teach in their final year of high school had become teachers by early adulthood. More recent research by Sikora (2021) illustrates a similar pattern, and that this pattern is gendered. Amongst their sample of 3343 young people in Australia, Sikora (2021) found that only one third of young women, and one fifth of young men, who said that they wanted to teach at age 16 had become a teacher by their early twenties.

Indeed, a key finding from research about who aspires to teach is that girls and young women are more likely to want to teach than boys and young men, as is reflected in the patterning of teacher shortages. Although teaching is a relatively common aspiration for boys (e.g., Chambers et al., 2018), more girls than boys reported teaching amongst their aspirations in studies set in England with 4 to 11 year olds (Hutchings, 1996), 7 to 11 year olds (Chambers et al., 2018), teenagers (Croll, 2008), and university students (Gorard et al., 2021; Kyriacou & Coulthard, 2000; See, 2004). These gendered differences are often considerable. See (2004) calculated that, all other things being equal, the young men in their study of undergraduate and postgraduate students were only 10% as likely to want to become a teacher as young women. Not only are girls and young women more likely to aspire to teach, but they are also more likely to realise their teaching aspirations. Both Hanushek and Pace (1995) and Sikora (2021) found that, in the US and Australia, respectively, young women who aspired to teach whilst they were still in school were much more likely to later become a teacher than the young men in their samples who had also expressed a teaching aspiration.

Also reflective of teacher shortage patterns, research has shown that young people in England who identify as White British are more likely to aspire to teach than those who identify as Minoritised Ethnicities. Studies in England with primary school students (Chambers et al., 2018), secondary school students (Platt & Parsons, 2018), and those studying at undergraduate level (Gorard et al., 2021) have shown that young people who identify as White British are more likely to express a teaching aspiration than their peers from Minoritised Ethnicities.

Current research also provides evidence that the influence of ethnicity upon young people’s teaching aspirations intersects with gender. In their study, Chambers et al. (2018) found that teaching was the most popular aspiration amongst girls who identified as White British, White Other, Asian/Asian British, and Mixed, whereas for girls who identified as Black (African, Caribbean, or British) teaching was the second most popular aspiration. Similarly, comparing data amongst different age groups surveyed in the UK, Platt and Parsons (2018) found that teaching was among the five most popular career aspirations for girls of all ethnicities at ages 7, 11, and 14, apart from those from Black Caribbean backgrounds. In the same study, teaching was only the top aspiration for girls who were White, however. The top aspiration for girls whose ethnicities were Mixed, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Black Caribbean, or Black African was working as a doctor (Platt & Parsons, 2018). Finally, although teaching was the fifth most popular job aspiration for White boys, teaching did not feature in the top five preferred jobs for boys of all other ethnicities (Platt & Parsons, 2018). This finding mirrors those from a qualitative study of 96 secondary school students conducted in England in the early 1990s, which found that twice as many Black young women than Black young men were interested in becoming a teacher (Dhingra & Dunkwu, 1995). Together, these data indicate that the social inequities of ethnicity and gender intersect, rather than work discretely, in terms of how they influence young people’s teaching aspirations.

An important limitation of existing literature is that, bar a handful of exceptions (e.g., Croll, 2008; Hanushek & Pace, 1995; Sikora, 2021), the little existing research that focuses on teaching aspirations is made up of one-off studies which have focused upon individual cohorts at one point in time. Current research therefore relies on participants pinpointing, often retrospectively, when they wanted to teach at a specific age or stage of education. As others have argued (e.g., Heinz, 2015; See et al., 2023), this reliance on one-off studies presents a potential gap in helping us to improve teacher shortages. In particular, existing methods fail to consider whether teaching aspirations may become more or less popular over time, a gap this paper aims to address by contributing new evidence.

3. Methods

In this paper, we analyse data stemming from six cross-sectional surveys administered to a cohort of young people in England at different time points—specifically, when the cohort was aged 10/11, 12/13, 13/14, 15/16, 17/18, and 21/22. These surveys were administered by the ASPIRES project, a national mixed-methods study on which all three authors worked, and which examined young people’s science and career aspirations in England (see Archer et al., 2023). The data presented are therefore a snapshot from a larger dataset which did not specifically focus on the profession of teaching. As is often the case with data originally collected for different purposes (Smith, 2008), the research questions which this paper seeks to answer were thus developed after all three authors were already familiar with the data.

Respondents to the six ASPIRES project surveys were young people living in England who were born between September 1998 and August 1999. Sample sizes and sampling methods differed with each survey according to the cohort’s age. As presented in

Table 1. Overview of survey respondents.

		Data Collection Phase
		1	2	3	4	5	6
Context	Year	2009/ 2010	2011/ 2012	2012/ 2013	2014/ 2015	2016/ 2017	2020/ 2021
	Cohort age	10/11	12/13	13/14	15/16	17/18	21/22
	Education stage	Primary school (School Year 6)	Secondary school (data collection took place in School Years 8, 9 and 11)			Sixth form or college	Higher Education and/or work
Sample	Respondents surveyed	9319 (from 279 schools)	5634 (from 69 schools)	4600 (from 147 schools)	13,421 (from 340 schools)	7013 (from 265 schools &colleges)	7635 (sampled via the Open Electoral Register)
	Gender breakdown	49.3% girls/young women, 50.6% boys/young men	59.6% girls/young women, 40.0% boys/young men	55.4% girls/young women, 44.4% boys/young men	53.3% girls/young women, 46.7% boys/young men	60.7% girls/young women, 39.3% boys/young men	59.3% girls/young women, 35.9% boys/young men
	Ethnicity breakdown	74.9% White, 8.9% South Asian, 6.9% Black, 1.4% East Asian, 7.8% mixed or other	75.3% White, 10.5% South Asian, 6.2% Black, 0.7% East Asian, 7.3% mixed or other	71.2% White, 13.5% South Asian, 6.2% Black, 1.5% East Asian, 7.6% mixed or other	75.9% White, 9.7% South Asian, 3.7% Black, 1.5% East Asian, 5.7% mixed or other	76.5% White, 10.0% South Asian, 4.3% Black, 1.8% East Asian, 5.8%% mixed or other	78.2% White, 9.2% South Asian, 3.7% Black, 7.3% mixed or other

, the first survey was completed by 9319 10/11 year olds recruited from 279 primary schools, the second survey was completed by 5634 12/13 year olds recruited from 69 secondary schools, the third survey was completed by 4600 students from 147 secondary schools, and the fourth survey was completed by 13,421 15/16 year olds from 340 secondary schools. Once the cohort had left secondary schooling, 7013 17/18 year olds recruited from 265 sixth forms and colleges completed the fifth survey, and 7635 21/22 year olds recruited via the UK’s Open Electoral Register completed the sixth survey. See Archer and DeWitt (2014), Moote and Archer (2018), and Archer et al. (2023) for more detailed information about survey sampling and data collection from the different phases of the project.

3.1. Data and Analysis

We here analyse two datasets from surveys administered by the ASPIRES project. The first dataset consists of free-text data and allows us to consider whether and how the proportion of young people who reported a specific aspiration to teach differs at different ages (RQ1). The second dataset, responses to a Likert-scale question on teaching, enables us to consider young people’s openness to teach at different ages (i.e., they agreed that they would like to be a teacher, but this was not necessarily their main aspiration), and whether this openness to teach was patterned by gender or ethnicity at different ages (RQ2).

3.1.1. Free-Text Data

The first data source used in this paper consists of free-text data which come from 30,559 responses to a survey question about future career aspirations asked in all six ASPIRES surveys. The wording of this open-ended question for the first three surveys (when respondents were aged 10/11, 12/13, and 13/14) was ‘what would you like to be when you grow up?’. The equivalent question in later surveys was ‘what would you like to be as an adult?’ when the cohort was age 15/16, ‘what job would you like in the future?’ when the cohort was age 17/18, and ‘what job/career would you like in the future?’ when the cohort was age 21/22. Despite these differences in specific wording, we consider the associated data to be comparable given the similarity of the questions posed. The free-text nature of these questions allowed respondents to type their career aspiration(s) in their own words into the online survey form. Some of these responses were one word (e.g., ‘teacher’), whilst others were a short sentence (e.g., ‘I would like to be a teacher’), and some young people responded to these questions with lists of multiple career aspirations (e.g., ‘teacher, doctor, or footballer’). Although free-text survey responses can be long or detailed, and thus treated as qualitative data (e.g., Garcia et al., 2004), the short responses to these questions mean that these data are here treated as quantitative data.

In order to analyse these free-text data, responses to the relevant question were coded using codes from the International Standard Classification of Occupations 2008 edition (ISCO-08; International Labour Office, 2012). This classification system was chosen because it has been used to code young people’s teaching aspirations in other large datasets of short-response free-text aspirations (e.g., Han, 2018; Han et al., 2018; Park & Byun, 2015). Through this process, the first author coded four types of teaching aspirations: the aspiration to become (1) a teacher in general (code 2300), (2) a primary school teacher (code 2341), (3) a secondary school teacher (code 2330), or (4) a special educational needs teacher (code 2352) (International Labour Office, 2012). For purposes of reliability, this coding was then shared with and reviewed by the second and third authors. The coding approach used follows the coding of teaching aspirations used by Han (2018) and excludes non-school teaching aspirations such as wanting to be a teaching assistant, a nursery or pre-school teacher, a Further Education teacher, a university lecturer, or a specialist non-school teacher of a specific sport or exercise. Although we recognise that these exclusions sit within the wider teaching profession, they mean that the data coded align with the definition of teacher used by the DfE (e.g., DfE, 2024b). Respondents who specified that they wanted to be a Head Teacher were coded as having a general teaching aspiration (code 2300), because of the traditional requirement within the English education system to be a classroom teacher before becoming a Head Teacher. In addition, those who expressed an aspiration to teach a specific subject (e.g., Art, or Physical Education) were coded as having a secondary school teaching aspiration (code 2330) unless they specified otherwise. The frequencies of free-text data on teaching are taken from the total number of respondents of each survey (see Table 1). We recognise two key limitations to this free-text dataset. First, the self-selecting nature of free-text responses means that such data are often unrepresentative of a survey’s total respondents. Research has shown that certain groups are more likely to respond to free-text survey questions than others (Garcia et al., 2004). Therefore, although the ASPIRES project surveyed a roughly nationally representative cohort of young people in each age group (Archer et al., 2023), we cannot rule out the possibility that those who aspire to teach may be under-, or over-, represented in these data. Second, changes to data management processes throughout the course of the ASPIRES project mean these data could not be matched to respondents’ other survey responses and/or demographic information. For this reason, and specifically to answer our second research question, we now turn to an additional data type from the ASPIRES surveys: Likert-scale data.

3.1.2. Likert-Scale Data

The second data source analysed in this paper consists of 32,139 survey responses to a Likert-scale question asked in the four most recent ASPIRES surveys. Young people surveyed at ages 13/14, 15/16, 17/18, and 21/22 were invited to rank their response to the statement ‘I would like to be a teacher or work with children’ on a five-point Likert scale ranging from ‘Strongly agree’ to ‘Strongly disagree’. This question was not included, however, in the ASPIRES project’s first two surveys. This question was asked alongside other Likert-scale questions about working in other professions, including business, hair and beauty, law, medicine, science, and sport. Young people’s responses to these Likert-scale questions were not mutually exclusive meaning, for instance, that respondents could report that they strongly agreed that they would like to be a teacher or work with children, and strongly agree that they would like to work in business. Importantly, these responses indicate an agreement to wanting to become a teacher or work with children, and enabled respondents to also agree that they would like to work in other professions. We therefore consider these results to represent a general ‘openness’ towards teaching, rather than an explicit aspiration to become a teacher as is shown in the free-text data. In contrast to the free-text data, however, these data can be linked to respondents’ other survey responses, including their demographic details.

An overview of responses to the Likert-scale question about openness to teaching ASPIRES is presented in

Table 2. Overview of respondents to the Likert-scale question about openness to teaching asked in the four most recent ASPIRES surveys.

	Total Number of Responses to the Statement ‘I Would Like to Be a Teacher or Work with Children’	Gender of Respondents Young Man or Boy/Young Woman or Girl	Ethnicity of Respondents White/Minoritised Ethnicities
Age of Respondents	N	n (%)	n (%)
Age 13/14 (2012/2013)	4560	2019/2533 (44%/56%)	3271/1289 (72%/28%)
Age 15/16 (2014/2015)	13,317	6201/7111 (47%/53%)	10,155/3161 (76%/24%)
Age 17/18 (2016/2017)	6632	2554/4078 (39%/61%)	5102/1530 (77%/23%)
Age 21/22 (2020/2021)	7630	2737/4528 (38%/62%)	5971/1545 (78%/20%)
Total	32,139

. It should first be noted that the totals presented in Table 2 differ slightly from those in Table 1 because not all young people surveyed at each data collection phase responded to all survey questions. For the purposes of analysis, we consider the responses to the ASPIRES Likert-scale question about openness to teaching from those who self-identified as a ‘girl’ (or young woman), alongside those who self-identified as a ‘boy’ (or young man). Respondents had the opportunity to report their gender as ‘non-binary’, ‘other’, or ‘prefer not to say’ and their ethnicity as ‘prefer not to say’ at age 21/22 but not at ages 13/14, 15/16, or 17/18. Therefore, to allow for comparison with other survey cohorts, respondents who selected these options at age 21/22 are not included in these analyses. Missing values were not also included in analyses of gender and ethnicity breakdowns, meaning that not all totals add up to 100%. There were six ethnicity categories provided to respondents of the ASPIRES surveys. We here compare the responses of those who self-identified their ethnicity as White with those identified their ethnicity as Black, South Asian, East Asian, Other, or Mixed. We collectively refer to these respondents as from ‘Minoritised Ethnicities’ to reflect the minoritisation of those who do not identify (or pass) as White (Selvarajah et al., 2020). Although we do not recognise gender or ethnicity as binaries, we suggest that this nominal treatment of the data allows us to conduct the descriptive statistical analyses required to answer this paper’s research questions.

Whilst the gender and ethnicity breakdowns of each survey cohort differs, ASPIRES the gender and ethnicity breakdowns of the survey samples at ages 13/14, 15/16, and 17/18 presented in Table 2 are roughly proportional to government gender and ethnicity estimates of the general population in England for their age group at the time. The gender breakdown for the sample at age 20/21 was less representative, which may be a consequence of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic at the time of data collection. For more information, see Archer and DeWitt (2017), Moote and Archer (2018) and Moote et al. (2020) and Archer et al. (2023). The literature on teaching aspirations also highlights patterns of inequities other than gender and ethnicity in young people’s teaching aspirations, including social class. The ASPIRES project used several different methods to collect and categorise respondents’ social class across the different ASPIRES project surveys, in order to reflect the potential for young people to become socially mobile as they grow older. This variation in social class categorisation across different age groups in the ASPIRES quantitative data makes comparison of the influence of social class upon teaching interests over time extremely difficult. Therefore, although we recognise that a young person’s gender and ethnicity are unlikely to work in isolation to influence their teaching interests, only these inequities are considered in this paper.

To analyse these data, we conducted descriptive analyses. SPSS software (version 28) was used to calculate the frequencies of those who strongly agreed or agreed that they would like to be a teacher or work with children when they were older. Next, in order to understand how responses to this Likert-scale question were patterned by respondents’ gender and ethnicity, we conducted cross-tabulation analyses. This was made possible by generating a binary variable for responses to each survey’s Likert-scale teaching question, which grouped together the responses ‘strongly agree’ with ‘agree’ (labelled as ‘yes’), and ‘neutral’ with ‘disagree’ and ‘strongly disagree’ (labelled as ‘no’). Because both gender and ethnicity were also treated as binaries for these analyses, the crosstabulation analyses produced were 2 × 2 associations.

Tests of the relationship between respondents’ self-reported gender and ethnicity and their openness to teaching were conducted using Chi-square tests for independence. For these analyses we employed Pearson Chi-Square value and Yates’ Continuity Correction value, which compensates for the overestimate of the Chi-square value when used with a 2 × 2 table (Pallant, 2020). Because the tables produced through these crosstabulation analyses were 2 × 2, we also considered the phi coefficient to determine the effect size of results pertaining to respondents’ gender and ethnicity, and interpreted these results according to the criteria outlined by Cohen (1988): 0.1 for small effect, 0.3 for medium effect, and 0.5 for large effect. For reliability reasons, these analyses were saved via SPSS syntax and were re-run and checked by a colleague.

4. Findings

4.1. A High Proportion of Young People Aspire to Teach

We first present results from analyses of free-text responses to a survey question about future career aspirations asked in all six surveys. Each survey asked respondents to write in their own words what job they would like as an adult. We then coded these responses using the ISCO-08 (International Labour Office, 2012) in order to calculate what proportion of respondents expressed a teaching aspiration in each different survey. The results of this coding are presented in

Table 3. Totals from free-text response coding.

	Teaching Aspiration According to ISCO-08 2300 = General Teacher/Unspecified Specialism 2341 = Primary Teacher 2330 = Secondary Teacher 2352 = Special Education Teacher				Respondents Who Reported a Teaching Aspiration		Total Free-Text Survey Responses
	Code 2300	Code 2341	Code 2330	Code 2352	n	%	N
Age 10/11 (2009/10)	448	24	66	1	539	5.78	9319
Age 12/13 (2011/12)	168	53	119	0	340	6.03	5634
Age 13/14 (2012/13)	103	58	109	2	272	5.91	4600
Age 15/16 (2014/15)	365	167	259	10	801	5.97	13,421
Age 17/18 (2016/17)	188	111	131	4	434	6.19	7013
Age 21/22 (2020/21)	92	34	26	3	155	2.03	7635

. The data demonstrate that aspirations to teach, in general, were the most popular teaching aspiration, followed by aspirations to teach at secondary school level. Strikingly, when rounded to the nearest whole percentage, the same proportion of ASPIRES survey respondents at ages 10/11, 12/13, 13/14, 15/16, and 17/18 (6%) wrote that they would like to work as a teacher when they were older. This proportion decreased to 2% of respondents at age 21/22.

These analyses represent one of the first quantitative explorations of a cohort’s teaching aspirations in England over time since Croll (2008). Nevertheless, the proportion of respondents ASPIRES who reported a teaching aspiration is similar to, though a little lower than, the proportion of young people who reported a teaching aspiration in previous one-off studies. Chambers et al. (2018) found that just under 11% of 7 to 11 year olds in the UK drew a teacher when asked to draw what they wanted to be when they were older. Similarly, Croll (2008) found that roughly 8% of 15 year olds in the British Household Panel Survey reported having a teaching aspiration.

Next, we consider data from responses to the Likert-scale question asked on the four most recent ASPIRES surveys.

Table 4. Total number of respondents who agreed or strongly agreed that they would like to be a teacher or work with children.

	Agreed or Strongly Agreed		Total Responses to Likert-Scale Question
	n	%	N
Age 13/14 (2012/13)	1529	34%	4560
Age 15/16 (2014/15)	4265	32%	13,317
Age 17/18 (2016/17)	2387	34%	6632
Age 21/22 (2020/21)	3236	42%	7630

shows that 34% of survey respondents at age 13/14 agreed that they would like to be a teacher or work with children, compared with 32% at age 15/16, 36% at age 17/18 and 42% at age 21/22. The main finding indicated by these data is that the proportion of respondents who reported that they were open to teaching is high—at least a third of young people. Indeed, this proportion remains high when viewed against responses to Likert-scale questions about working in other professions ASPIRES. Previous analyses of ASPIRES data show that only 16% of the same cohort (between ages 10/11 and 17/18) agreed or strongly agreed that they wanted to become a scientist (Archer et al., 2020). The same analyses also show that the only career which more respondents reported being open to than teaching was business. Teaching was more popular than careers in art and design, celebrity, law, inventing, sports, medicine, engineering, science, manual trades, and hair and beauty (Archer et al., 2020). We argue that these data suggest an openness to teaching amongst many young people in England. This openness to teaching is important as it could mean that there is an untapped pool of potential future teachers, most of whom seem not to pursue teaching at present given the ongoing teacher shortages.

As with the free-text data analysis, the results presented in Table 4 illustrate that a similar proportion of young people are open to teaching at different ages. Given the cross-sectional methods employed in this study, we caution that this finding represents consistency in the proportion of young people open to teaching at different ages, rather than at a stability of young people’s teaching aspirations over time. Despite this relative consistency, there is a slight upward trend in the proportion of young people open to teaching at age 21/22 (42%) compared with other age groups (34%, 32% and 36%). This increase could reflect the ongoing economic uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic at the time of this final survey, which we know saw a temporary increase in the number of young people applying to become a teacher in England (e.g., UCAS, 2023; Worth & Faulkner-Ellis, 2021). In other words, this finding is illustrative of the social and contextual influences upon teaching aspirations (e.g., Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; Ray, 2006), rather than simply the impact of individuals’ motivations.

4.2. Teaching Aspirations Are Patterned by Gender

The first crosstabulation analyses we conducted explored to what extent young people’s self-reported gender identity patterned whether or not they agreed that they wanted to teach or work with children at different ages. These results are presented in

Table 5. Survey respondents who agreed or disagreed that they would like to be a teacher or work with children, by gender (girl or young woman vs. boy or young man).

		Agreed or Strongly Agreed		Neutral, Disagreed or Strongly Disagreed		Total
		n	%	n	%	N
Age 13/14 (2012/13)	Girl or young woman	1164	46%	1369	54%	2533
	Boy or young man	364	18%	1655	82%	2019
	χ2 (1, n = 4552) = 391.616, p = 0.000, phi = 0.294
Age 15/16 (2014/15)	Girl or young woman	3128	44%	3983	56%	7111
	Boy or young man	1134	18%	5067	82%	6201
	χ2 (1, n = 13,312) = 1004.054, p = 0.000, phi = 0.275
Age 17/18 (2016/17)	Girl or young woman	1756	43%	2322	57%	4078
	Boy or young man	631	25%	1923	75%	2554
	χ2 (1, n = 6632) = 228.842, p = 0.000, phi = 0.186
Age 21/22 (2020/21)	Girl or young woman	2299	51%	2229	49%	4528
	Boy or young man	805	29%	1932	71%	2737
	χ2 (1, n = 7265) = 317.217, p = 0.000, phi = 0.209

, which shows that more girls or young women, than boys or young men, agreed that they would like to be a teacher or work with children at all four ages surveyed ASPIRES between 13/14 and 21/22 years of age. For example, 46% of girls or young women compared with only 18% of boys or young men at age 13/14 agreed or strongly agreed that they would like to be a teacher or work with children. In addition, the slight increase in the proportion of young people who report an openness to teach at age 20/21 seems to be evident across both genders. These data suggest that more boys or young men, as well as girls or young women, became open to teaching as they grew older.

Importantly, a Chi-square test for independence indicated a statistically significant association between respondents’ gender and whether or not they agreed that they would like to be a teacher or work with children across all four age groups surveyed. The phi coefficient value indicated a small to medium effect for each of the four age groups. For example, for the 21/22-year-old sample, the results of chi-square test for independence were χ² (1, n = 7265) = 317.217, p = 0.000), phi = 0.209. This finding contributes to existing research which has shown that more girls and young women, compared to boys and young men, aspire to teach at specific ages (e.g., Chambers et al., 2018; Gorard et al., 2021). Specifically, we here demonstrate that girls and young women surveyed for the ASPIRES project were significantly more likely to report that they were open to teaching at ages 13/14, 15/16, 17/18, and 21/22 than boys and young men surveyed at the same ages.

4.3. Teaching Aspirations Are Patterned by Ethnicity

Next, we examined to what extent young people’s ethnicity patterned their openness to teach at different ages. The results of the resulting cross-tabulation analyses are presented in

Table 6. Survey respondents who agreed or disagreed that they would like to be a teacher or work with children, by ethnicity (White vs. Minoritised Ethnicities [ME]).

		Agreed or Strongly Agreed		Neutral, Disagreed or Strongly Disagreed		Total
		n	%	n	%	N
Age 13/14 (2012/13)	White	1128	34%	2143	66%	3271
	ME	401	31%	888	69%	1289
	χ2 (1, n = 4560) = 4.577, p = 0.032, phi = −0.032
Age 15/16 (2014/15)	White	3370	33%	6785	67%	10155
	ME	895	28%	2266	72%	3161
	χ2 (1, n = 13,316) = 26.058, p = 0.000, phi = −0.044
Age 17/18 (2016/17)	White	1895	37%	3207	63%	5102
	ME	492	32%	1038	68%	1530
	χ2 (1, n = 6632) = 12.483, p = 0.000, phi = −0.044
Age 21/22 (2020/21)	White	2536	42%	3435	58%	5971
	ME	660	43%	885	57%	1545
	χ2 (1, n = 7516) = 0.021, p = 0.884, phi = 0.002

, and show that more young people who identified as White expressed an openness to teach than those who identified as Minoritised Ethnicities at ages 13/14, 15/16, and 17/18. This pattern was not the case at age 21/22, however, where a very similar amount of young people who identified as Minoritised Ethnicities (43%), compared to those who identified as White (42%), reported that they were open to teaching. These data show that the slight increase in openness to teaching seen at age 21/22 is observed amongst respondents who identified as White and those who identified as Minoritised Ethnicities.

A Chi-square test for independence indicated a significant statistical association between respondents’ ethnicities and whether or not they (strongly) agreed that they would like to be a teacher or work with children at ages 13/14, 15/16, and 17/18. The phi coefficient value indicated a very small effect in these first three surveys. For example, amongst 13/14 year olds, the results were as follows: χ² (1, n = 4560) = 4.577, p = 0.032), phi = −0.032. This finding extends previous research findings which have shown that young people who identify as White are more likely to aspire to become a teacher up to the age of 14 (Chambers et al., 2018; Platt & Parsons, 2018). Analyses illustrate that survey respondents who identified as White were significantly more likely than those who identified as Minoritised Ethnicities to report they were open to teaching at ages 13/14, 15/16, and 17/18. The lack of statistical significance between the association of respondents’ ethnicities and their openness to teach at age 21/22 could be another consequence of the economic uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic at the time of this final survey, and the resulting increase in the number of young people applying to become a teacher at this time (UCAS, 2023; Worth & Faulkner-Ellis, 2021).

5. Discussion

This paper has presented an examination of who aspires to become a teacher at different ages in England. These analyses extend findings from previous research by tracking young people’s teaching aspirations over 11 years, rather than focusing on only one age group. First, analyses of free-text data on teaching aspirations found that a relatively high proportion (6%) of young people aspire to teach across the ages of 10/11, 12/13, 13/14, 15/16, and 17/18, and that this proportion remains fairly stable across these different age groups. Despite limitations in the free-text data, these findings were echoed in analysis of Likert-scale data on young people’s openness to teach, which also showed a slight increase in this openness to teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Taken together, we argue that these findings develop current knowledge that teaching is a relatively popular career aspiration amongst young people (e.g., Chambers et al., 2018; Croll, 2008; Platt & Parsons, 2018), suggesting that more young people in England may be open to becoming a teacher than the number who ultimately enter the profession.

Against a backdrop of worsening teacher shortages, it could be argued these data paint a potentially promising picture for teacher supply. This is because although 8% of the UK workforce are employed within education (ONS, 2024), typically only 1–2% of the total workforce in England are schoolteachers (Santiago, 2004). It should also be borne in mind that these data include those who reported teaching alongside other aspirations. Some of those who reported a teaching aspiration may therefore include those who considered teaching to be a back-up or second-choice career aspiration. Given that most teachers report that teaching was not a ‘fallback’ career for them (e.g., Watt et al., 2017), however, we might not expect many of these aspirations to be acted upon. Moreover, we know from existing research that most young people drop their teaching aspirations before they enter the workforce (Croll, 2008; Hanushek & Pace, 1995; Sikora, 2021). In other words, the initially encouraging nature of these results should not be overestimated in terms of their potential for translating into teacher recruitment.

The similar proportion of young people who aspired to teach at different ages could also be interpreted as indicating a consistency of teaching aspirations over time. Yet data from other studies suggest that the consistency in the proportion of teaching aspirations between different age groups should not be interpreted as stability of teaching aspirations. For example, Sikora (2021) found that most of the teenagers they surveyed in Australia dropped their earlier teaching aspirations by young adulthood, but that these individuals were ‘replaced’ in the statistics by others who had developed a teaching aspiration for the first time in early adulthood. In particular, due to the cross-sectional nature of our data, we suggest that these results should not be considered as evidence that most young people in England maintain their teaching aspirations over time, but that a similar proportion of young people aspire to teach at ages 10/11, 12/13, 13/14, 15/16, 17/18, and, to a slightly lesser extent, at age 21/22.

Next, we observed a drop in the proportion of respondents reporting a teaching aspiration at age 21/22 in their free-text responses. This drop is striking given both the consistency in the proportion of those reporting a teaching aspiration at ages 10/11, 12/13, 13/14, 15/16, and 17/18, and the increase in respondents reporting an openness to teaching at age 21/22 in the Likert-scale data. One important factor which is likely to have influenced this drop in explicit teaching aspirations—but increased openness to teaching—is the age of participants. Whilst the first five surveys could be understood more accurately as representing future career aspirations, by age 21/22, many respondents were likely to already be pursuing (or soon planning to pursue) their first career. Viewed with this age in mind, then, the finding that only 2% of 21/22-year-old respondents reported an explicit aspiration to teach, whilst 42% reported an openness to teach, supports the idea that more young people have teaching as a back-up or second-choice career aspiration if another career does not work out than as a first-choice career aspiration.

Our second and third key findings relate to who aspires to become a teacher. Evidence from the existing literature shows that multiple social inequities influence young people’s teaching aspirations (e.g., Platt & Parsons, 2018); however, less is known about how this influence might differ at different ages. Analysing ASPIRES survey data has enabled us to contribute to addressing this gap by examining the gender and ethnicity of those who report being open to teaching at different ages. We found that girls or young women were significantly more likely than boys or young men to be open to teaching at ages 13/14, 15/16, 17/18, and 21/22. We also found that young people who identified as White were significantly more likely than respondents who identified as Minoritised Ethnicities to be open to teaching. This patterning of teaching aspirations by gender and ethnicity echoes findings from one-off studies looking at teaching aspirations amongst only one age group (e.g., Gorard et al., 2021), which is unsurprising given that more women than men teach, and that the vast majority of teachers in England identify as White British (DfE, 2024b).

In presenting these analyses, we do not assume that respondents’ gender and ethnicity fully explain the variation in their likelihood of agreeing or disagreeing with the statement ‘I would like to be a teacher or work with children’ at different ages, especially as gender and ethnicity are here treated as binaries. In other words, and as others have argued in relation to quantitative data in the field of education (e.g., Gillborn et al., 2017), our data can only highlight patterns in who aspires to teach, and not why these patterns exist. Furthermore, we acknowledge that young people’s teaching aspirations are very likely influenced by multiple and intersecting social and cultural inequities. Put simply, additional factors other than gender and ethnicity are highly likely to influence whether or not a young person reports an interest in teaching or openness towards teaching (e.g., Gore et al., 2015; See et al., 2022). Nevertheless, informed by our social justice approach, we argue that the statistical significance of the findings presented extends findings from previous research to establish that the patterning of teaching aspirations by gender and ethnicity is more than happenstance and is likely the result of ingrained social structures (Kotonya et al., 2025).

6. Implications of This Work

Finally, we consider what these findings may mean against a backdrop of severe and long-standing teacher shortages. The first implication arising from our findings is that young people who aspire to teach may not only do so because of their proximity to teachers. It has been suggested that the popularity of teaching amongst young people is simply because teaching is a career that young people know, or are familiar with, through their time at school (e.g., Chambers et al., 2018; Lortie, 2002). This suggestion implies that most young people drop their interest in teaching after leaving compulsory education. Our analyses contradict this assumption by illustrating that a third of young people surveyed between ages 10/11 and 17/18, and even more at age 20/21, had an interest in teaching. Even if proximity to teachers does prompt some young people to want to teach, it would appear that this proximity has a lasting impact. We caution that these findings should be interpreted with consideration of the wider context within which this research took place. Most notably, the survey when respondents were aged 20/21 was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. This timing may mean that the relatively high interest in teaching reported amongst this age group in the Likert-scale data could have been influenced by increased economic and job market uncertainty during this period.

A second implication of this research is that the teaching workforce is likely to remain patterned by gender and ethnicity. Although we do not consider aspirations to indicate a definitive future pathway (Archer & DeWitt, 2017), the patterning of teaching aspirations by gender and ethnicity here indicate that the teaching workforce could remain dominated by White women in the future unless there are targeted efforts to change this status quo. Whilst this research does not pertain to solving this dilemma, we again highlight that most teacher recruitment policy efforts have not focussed upon diversifying the workforce (e.g., DfE, 2019; House of Commons Education Committee, 2024; Kotonya et al., 2025; The Labour Party, 2024). Fraser (2010) argues that working towards social justice involves dismantling the structural obstacles which prevent some people from participating on a par with others. Informed by this lens, we suggest that more targeted efforts might be made to diversify teacher recruitment in England, as are being explored in Wales (Welsh Government, 2024).

Perhaps the most important implication of our findings with regard to teacher shortages is that many young people who are interested in teaching do not go on to become teachers. Indeed, existing studies which have tracked teaching aspirations from childhood into adulthood all also indicate that most young people drop their teaching aspirations before they enter the workforce (Croll, 2008; Hanushek & Pace, 1995; Sikora, 2021). We here argue, however, that the high proportion of young people who reported an openness to teaching provides some promise for teacher recruitment. Specifically, the data considered here suggest that teaching may be a common back-up or second-choice career aspiration, and that a significant minority of the non-teaching workforce may still consider pursuing teaching as a second, or later, career. We here use the term ‘back-up’ as an umbrella term which denotes a wide spectrum of interests in teaching, but which indicates that teaching is often seen as a second-best and accessible alternative to other careers. This framing may in part be a result of what Lortie (2002) referred to as the ‘wide decision range’ of teaching, meaning that an individual can choose to pursue teaching at any age. Indeed, in England this decision range may be further widened by the short length of teacher education programmes compared with that of other countries (Allen & Sims, 2018), as well as the knowledge that more people are needed in the profession.

Whilst the data in this study cannot fully explain why teaching may be a common back-up career aspiration, this finding raises the question of what can be done to encourage more, and more diverse, young people to pursue teaching as a first-choice career. Existing research with those who report having turned away from teaching suggests that this is undoubtedly a complex question (Pop & Turner, 2009; Thomson, 2013). Our previous research (MacLeod, 2023) does, however, suggest that more increased careers education information, advice and guidance informing young people that, and how, they can become teachers may help more of those who are uncertain to seriously consider a career in teaching. Evidence from the US indicates that shaping this approach around common misconceptions about the teaching profession may be particularly effective, including for those from Minoritised Ethnicities (Adams et al., 2021; May, 2021). In other words, because an individual’s teaching aspirations are strongly informed by their social and cultural context (Ray, 2006), to make access to teaching more equitable we must work to improve and broaden social and cultural norms and stereotypes surrounding the teaching profession (Ewing et al., 2021).

This research contributes to our contextual understandings of teacher shortages, and is the first known study to specifically track teaching aspirations in England over an extended period of time. Our cross-sectional methods mean, however, that we were unable to trace the stability or consistency of teaching aspirations held by individuals. As has been proposed by other researchers (e.g., Heinz, 2015), this study’s findings suggest that future research into teacher supply might employ longitudinal research methods in order to more closely trace young people’s aspirations into teaching over time. Indeed, the increased priority of longitudinal research in the UK (Davis-Kean et al., 2017), along with the availability of secondary data within the field of education research (Smith, 2008), provide a fruitful landscape for future longitudinal research into teacher supply. Finally, we advocate for future research to examine more diverse samples of potential teachers, and to take an intersectional lens in these analyses. The methods employed in this paper mean that we were not able to explore how, for example, having a physical disability and/or identifying as non-binary might influence the development or consistency of teaching aspirations. Surveying cohorts with these, and other, demographics in mind would thus be worth considering in future research if we are to better understand and inform teacher recruitment.