HR In the Education Sector: Navigating Staff Retention, Budgets, And Burnout

Schools, colleges and universities employ close to a million people in England alone, and HR teams across the education sector are under sustained pressure to keep that workforce staffed, supported and stable.

Retention, budgets and burnout have become the three defining challenges of HR in the education sector, and they are closely linked.

A tighter budget makes it harder to compete on pay, which fuels burnout among stretched teams, which in turn drives the very turnover that budgets can least afford. For anyone working in human resources in education, building the skills to navigate this cycle, for example through CIPD accredited HR qualifications, has never been more valuable.

The scale of the challenge

Official figures make clear why staff retention is such a pressing issue for education HR. Department for Education data shows that while almost 9 in 10 (89.7%) newly qualified teachers are still teaching a year after qualifying, that figure falls to three quarters (75.8%) after three years, two thirds (67.4%) after five years, and under 6 in 10 (57.7%) after ten years.

Teacher sickness absence has also crept up, with 61.8% of teachers taking some sickness absence in the 2024/25 academic year, roughly 8 percentage points higher than pre-pandemic levels.

Higher education faces a different but related set of pressures. According to the Office for Students, 45% of higher education providers were projected to report a deficit in 2025-26 without mitigating action, driven by frozen domestic tuition fees and a sharp fall in international student income following visa restrictions.

The result has been redundancy programmes, hiring freezes and, in some institutions, industrial action, with 2026 seeing pay disputes and strikes affecting dozens of universities over pay, workload and job security.

For HR challenges in the education sector at every level, from schools to higher education HR teams, the underlying story is the same: a workforce under pressure, and budgets that leave little room to manoeuvre.

Why staff retention is such a persistent problem

Retention in education rarely comes down to a single cause. Workload is consistently cited as the biggest driver of stress in UK workplaces generally, and education is no exception, with heavy marking loads, administrative demands and behaviour management placing significant pressure on staff.

Pay is a related factor. Teacher and lecturer salaries have not always kept pace with the private sector, and in further and higher education, pay competitiveness has fallen in recent years.

Limited career progression compounds the problem. NFER's 2026 analysis of the education workforce identifies a lack of career progression opportunities as a key challenge for further education teachers, support staff and experienced early years professionals alike, alongside teacher and school support staff shortages.

When staff cannot see a clear route forward, even reasonably satisfied employees start to look elsewhere.

Finally, there is the emotional demand of education roles themselves. Teaching, lecturing and pastoral roles ask staff to manage not just academic outcomes but the wellbeing, behaviour and safeguarding of the young people and adults in their care. That emotional labour, sustained day after day, is a significant contributor to burnout even before workload and pay pressures are added to the mix.

Budget pressures compounding the problem

HR teams in education are rarely negotiating pay, recruitment or wellbeing initiatives with a blank cheque. According to a written ministerial statement to the House of Commons from the Education Secretary, schools are currently expected to absorb around the first 1% of teacher pay awards in both 2026-27 and 2027-28 through better value from existing spend, even as the Department for Education provides additional funding, including £700 million this financial year rising to £1,115 million in 2027-28, to support schools with the wider cost of pay awards.

Further education providers face a similar squeeze, with an additional £120 million allocated for 2026-27, rising to £365 million in 2027-28, aimed at supporting the sector's skilled workforce pipeline. In higher education, the picture is starker still, with some universities cutting hundreds of posts and restructuring costs, including voluntary redundancy schemes, rising sharply across the sector.

For HR in education, this means recruitment, retention and wellbeing strategies increasingly need to deliver more with less, rather than relying on additional budget to fix workforce problems.

Burnout and the emotional cost of education roles

Burnout is not unique to education, but the sector's combination of high emotional demand, public accountability and constrained resources makes staff particularly vulnerable to it. Mental Health UK's Burnout Report 2026, based on YouGov polling of over 4,500 UK adults, found that 91% of adults experienced high or extreme stress in the past year, and one in five workers took time off sick due to poor mental health caused by stress.

High or increased workload was the single biggest driver of workplace stress, cited by 42% of workers, with a third also reporting they regularly work unpaid overtime beyond their contracted hours.

For education staff specifically, rising sickness absence rates suggest the picture is, if anything, more acute than the national average. Left unaddressed, burnout does not just harm individual staff wellbeing, it directly feeds the retention crisis HR teams are trying to solve.

Practical HR strategies to reduce turnover and burnout

Effective human resource management in education needs to address these root causes directly, rather than treating retention, budgets and burnout as separate problems.

Wellbeing initiatives matter, but only when they go beyond awareness raising. Mental Health UK's research found that almost a third of workers feel their employer raises awareness of mental health without giving managers the time, training or resources to act on it.

As we've explored in our guide to how HR leaders shape up employee wellbeing, structured return to work support, manager training in spotting early signs of stress, and regular wellbeing check-ins tend to have far more impact than one-off campaigns.

Flexible working options, where roles allow it, can ease some of the pressure that drives staff away, particularly for support staff and professional services roles where rigid scheduling is not always essential.

Our piece on the role of HR in flexible working covers this in more depth. Simple measures such as flexible start times or compressed hours can improve retention without additional budget.

Professional development opportunities directly address the career progression gap NFER identified as a key retention risk. Investing in accredited qualifications, whether through CIPD routes for HR and people professionals or leadership and management training for department heads, signals to staff that there is a future within the organisation, not just a job.

Finally, improved recruitment processes reduce the downstream pressure on existing staff.

Faster, more structured recruitment reduces the time posts sit vacant, which in turn reduces the overtime and cover pressures placed on remaining staff, one of the clearest drivers of burnout identified in workplace research.

Building a more stable learning environment

Retention, budgets and burnout are ultimately a students' issue as much as an HR one. High staff turnover disrupts continuity of teaching and pastoral care, while burnt out staff are less able to give students their full attention and support.

Getting HR strategy right in education does not just reduce costly turnover, it creates the stable, well supported workforce that underpins a genuinely effective learning environment.

How MOL can support HR teams in education

At MOL, we work with education providers across the schools, further education and higher education sectors to build HR and leadership capability where it is needed most.

Our CIPD accredited Human Resources qualifications give HR professionals in education the skills to manage retention, wellbeing and recruitment strategically, while our Management and Leadership qualifications support department heads and senior leaders navigating exactly these pressures day to day.

To find out how we can support your HR team, explore our CIPD Human Resources courses or contact our team.