This webinar examined the key resources and conditions that support the teaching profession, against the backdrop of persistent teacher shortages, uneven working conditions and rising stress and burnout across European school systems. The event brought together comparative survey evidence from TALIS 2024 by Letizia Gambi (Ku Leuven, DG EAC), causal evidence on the effectiveness of professional development by Samuel Sims (University Collage London), and an analysis on teacher well-being and its factors by Ana Kozina (Educational Research Institute) offering participants a nuanced picture of what improves teachers' working experience and retention.
Taken together, the presentations underscored that supporting the teaching profession requires acting on working conditions, professional development quality and individual well-being simultaneously. Letizia Gambi showed, using TALIS 2024 data, that job resources such as mentoring, teacher agency, collaborative school environments and supportive leadership are linked to higher job satisfaction and well-being, while job demands such as administrative workload and student behaviour issues are linked to lower satisfaction and stronger intentions to leave. Samuel Sims presented causal evidence that professional development can meaningfully improve student learning, but unders specific design conditions. According to evidence, the professional development teachers typically receive shows no measurable benefit, while instructional coaching and modelling-based approaches consistently outperform traditional formats. Finally, Ana Kozina highlighted that teachers' social and emotional competencies and well-being are closely linked to student outcomes, and that both personal and school/system-level resources need to be strengthened together to support teachers' job retention. Taken together, these findings suggest that closing the evidence-to-policy-to-practice gap require more rigorous evaluation of what is currently offered to teachers and treating professional development and collaboration as core elements of the job.
Key takeaways for policy and practice
System-level preconditions
- Treat retention as the core problem: teacher shortages are often framed as a hiring challenge, but day-to-day working conditions and job demands are equally decisive for whether teachers stay in the profession.
- Fund and design leadership development: school leaders are still mostly trained as teachers, with little leadership-specific preparation, yet supportive leadership (fostering collaboration, autonomy and constructive feedback) is one of the strongest predictors of teacher satisfaction and well-being.
- Reduce unnecessary administrative burden: administrative workload was repeatedly identified as a source of stress for both teachers and school leaders, and as something that undermines the time and energy available for professional learning.
Mixed outcomes and open questions
- Typical professional development shows little measurable benefit: evidence suggests that professional development as typically delivered does not improve student learning, while well-designed, well-resourced programmes (e.g. instructional coaching with modelling) can produce medium-sized gains.
- Quality matters more than quantity: whether a given activity functions as a "resource" or a "demand" for a teacher depends on its relevance and fit. For this reason, mandating fixed hours of generic training can be as counterproductive as offering none.
- Predictors of well-being are rarely studied together: research has identified many teacher-, classroom-, school- and system-level factors associated with well-being and/or burnout, but how they interact remains understudied.
Practical design principles
- Prioritise instructional coaching and modelling: individualised, coach-based professional development (especially when it includes observing a demonstrated practice) has stronger causal evidence of improving both teaching and student learning than group-based or one-off training formats.
- Protect and integrate time for collaboration and learning: professional development and peer collaboration should be built into teachers' core working time rather than treated as an add-on, supported where possible by reducing administrative load (e.g. through responsible use of AI for routine tasks).
- Interventions addressing emotional regulation, classroom relationships, and collaborative, trust-based school communities sustain teachers across their careers.
- Although a range of programmes show promise, rigorous, well-resourced causal evaluation remains limited, and much of what is currently delivered to teachers has not been tested for its actual impact on learning or well-being.
- More systematic evaluation is needed to clarify what works, for whom, and at what cost.
- teacher
- Thursday 9 July 2026, 14:30 - 15:46 (CEST)
- Live streaming available
- Thematic areas covered
- Teachers and trainers
Practical information
- When
- Thursday 9 July 2026, 14:30 - 15:46 (CEST)
- Languages
- English
Description
Key findings from each speaker's presentation
Letizia Gambi: The teaching profession in the EU – a comparative analysis building on TALIS 2024
KU Leuven, Leuven Economics of Education Research Group; external expert for DG EAC
Drawing on TALIS 2024 and 2018 data together with complementary sources, Gambi presented findings structured around the job demands–job resources model, distinguishing aspects of teachers' work that support them (job resources) from those that require sustained effort and can lead to strain (job demands). The report found that job resources (including induction, mentoring, teacher agency, collaborative school environments and supportive school leadership) are linked to higher job satisfaction and better well-being, while job demands such as administrative workload, classroom discipline and student behaviour are linked to lower satisfaction, poorer well-being and stronger intentions to leave the profession.
Evidence shows that school environments across the EU are becoming more collaborative, though this collaboration remains largely informal (e.g. sharing materials) rather than practice-focused (e.g. team teaching, classroom observation). Also, over 85% of teachers report a good relationship with their school leader. Continuing professional development (CPD) participation is near universal, but still concentrated on traditional topics, leaving persistent gaps in areas such as special education needs, social-emotional learning, AI use and classroom management. Gambi concluded that strengthening job resources has strong potential to improve teacher well-being, satisfaction and retention, but that more causal evidence is needed on which specific interventions work best, in which context, and for whom.
Links shared:
- 2026 Council Recommendation on human capital in the European Union
- interim evaluation of the 2021– 2030 EEA Strategic Framework
- 2025 Union of Skills Communication
- 2025 Action Plan on Basic Skills
- Teachers dashboard: Education and Training Monitor 2025
- The report “The teaching profession in the EU”
Samuel Sims: Teacher professional development – costs, benefits and policy, from the Handbook chapter with the Association of Education Finance and Policy (US)
Associate Professor, UCL
Samuel Sims presented causal (experimental and quasi-experimental) evidence on professional development (PD) effectiveness, organised around five key findings. First, well-designed PD can have medium-sized effects at low cost: the "My Teaching Partner" coaching programme, evaluated in three experimental studies, produced a learning gain equivalent to roughly 44% of a typical year's progress for grade 5–6 students, at a low relative cost of about $228 (£175) per student. Second, broader systematic reviews spanning hundreds of evaluated PD programmes show a smaller average effect of 13–20% of a year's learning, with wide variation in effectiveness across programmes. Third, "typical" PD as usually delivered shows no measurable benefit for student learning. Evidence from a 15-year-old Florida study and from TIMSS data on 30,000 teachers across 66 countries found no relationship between hours of PD and improved outcomes. Fourth, when the same content is delivered via instructional coaching rather than traditional seminars, coaching produces greater effects on teaching practice and student learning, though coach quality matters and it is not yet well understood what makes a coach effective. Fifth, PD that includes modelling, meaning an observable demonstration of a teaching practice, accelerates skill acquisition faster than approaches without modelling, based on classroom-simulator studies and meta-analyses of early-years teachers. Sims concluded that PD can be highly effective when well designed (particularly instructional coaching with modelling), but that PD needs improving, alongside efforts to widen access to good coaches.
Links shared:
Ana Kozina: Teachers' social and emotional competencies, well-being, and support across career stages
Head of the Centre for Evaluation Studies, Educational Research Institute
Drawing on findings from an upcoming ENESET analytical report (co-authored with Erna Wirtz), Ana Kozina used the prosocial classroom model and a positive teacher development model to frame how teachers' social-emotional competence and well-being connect to classroom processes and, ultimately, student academic and social-emotional outcomes. Her review of peer-reviewed European literature since 2021 found that job satisfaction and burnout are shaped by a combination of internal assets (teacher characteristics such as personality, motivation, cognition and, especially, emotional regulation) and external assets (classroom, school and system characteristics). At classroom and school level, relationship quality, classroom management, collaborative teaching, shared values and supportive leadership emerged as important; at system level, tailored professional development, induction, mentoring and coaching programmes stood out. A key caveat was that these predictors have rarely been studied together, so how they interact remains an open research question. Kozina's resulting policy recommendations spanned classroom/school-level measures, mainly autonomy support, supervision, mentoring, induction, coaching, social-emotional learning interventions, and system-level measures such as tailored PD, career-entry models, smaller classes, permanent contracts, while cautioning that addressing teacher shortages should not come at the cost of diluting the value and standards of the profession.
Links shared: