Culture, Employee Experience, and Retention in Multi-Academy Trusts: Why Recruitment Depends on Closing the Gap

Every Multi-Academy Trust is working relentlessly against the same challenges - rising workload, constrained budgets, tougher accountability, and a national recruitment struggle that makes every vacancy harder to fill and every resignation more expensive.

The well-being data shows how stretched the workforce has become:

• The Teacher Wellbeing Index 2025 reports an average sector wellbeing score of 43.42 (Warwick–Edinburgh scale), the lowest recorded since 2019, and 36% of education staff scored in a range indicating probable clinical depression
• DfE workforce data shows why this matters operationally, not just emotionally. In state-funded schools in England (published June 2025), there were 41,736 FTE teacher entrants and 40,813 FTE teacher leavers, with a teacher vacancy rate of 0.5% (5 per 1,000 teachers)

In the current climate, it’s tempting to treat culture and employee experience as important, but not a priority. In reality, they are the conditions that determine whether your Trust can keep top talent. And, in 2025/26, retention and recruitment are the same problem.

The True Cost of Recruitment 

Full Economic Cost

A UCL/CEPEO working paper analysing England’s retention payments models the alternative to retaining a teacher as recruiting and training an equivalent replacement teacher, estimating this at ~ £92,000 per teacher.

Immediate Visible Cost

Even before recruitment/induction time, schools often carry cover costs while a vacancy is filled or a new hire is onboarded. DfE-commissioned research (reported in a Parliamentary written answer) found the average daily cost to the school of a supply teacher was:

• £218 (primary)
• £291 (secondary)
• £270 (special)

So, depending on how you count it, replacing a teacher can range from several thousand pounds in short-term cover alone (DfE supply cost averages of £218–£291 per day) to much larger ‘all-in’ estimates when you include recruitment and training -modelled at around £92k per equivalent replacement in England.

Retention is the Front Door to Recruitment

When retention is fragile, recruitment becomes reactive. Leaders spend more time re-hiring rather than improving. Teams lose rhythm, and vacancies become a recurring disruption rather than an occasional event. The cost impact isn’t just financial, it’s also reputational. Education is a networked labour market. People talk, and patterns travel.

When retention is strong, recruitment changes character. Candidates hear consistent stories. Referrals increase. New starters arrive into stable teams with clearer routines and more predictable expectations. In other words: retention doesn’t just reduce vacancies, it improves the quality of future hires.

Culture and Employee Experience 

Culture is what your Trust rewards, tolerates, and repeats, especially under pressure. Employee experience (EX) is what it feels like to work in the setting day-to-day, linked to pace, clarity, respect, support, and fairness.

Culture is the story leadership tells itself. EX is what teachers live.

That gap is where many Trusts lose people. Not because leaders don’t care, but because the lived experience can result in initiative overload, shifting priorities, inconsistent implementation, or expectations that grow without protected time to meet them.

Why Teachers Actually Resign

Most resignations aren’t caused by one hard week. They emerge after a long build-up of factors that suggest sustainability is the problem.

Three that are particularly common in MAT contexts are:

1. “My professional judgement isn’t trusted”

Teachers are often at their most committed when they can see the link between effort and impact. When improvement work is welcomed, but classroom judgement is constrained by constant compliance demands or frequent shifts in direction, people stop investing discretionary energy. They don’t become less committed to children; they become less confident that the organisation knows what to protect. That sense of being unheard isn’t anecdotal… In the DfE’s Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders (Wave 4, 2025), only 7% agreed that teachers’ views are valued by policymakers, whilst 82% disagreed.

2. “Accountability doesn’t feel fair”

In healthy cultures, accountability is clear and proportionate. In fragile cultures, it becomes blurred, with expectations rising, context being ignored, and outcomes that are judged without a shared understanding of what was realistically possible. Top talent and high performers can cope with challenge, but they struggle to cope with inconsistency and perceived injustice. The DfE data backs up how widespread this perception is. In Wave 4 (2025), just 19% agreed that the school inspection regime provides a fair assessment of school performance, while 64% disagreed.

3. “The job is becoming unmanageable, and I’m carrying it alone”

This is where “employee experience” becomes very practical. Teachers don’t leave because teaching is demanding; they leave when the conditions and environment add demands that feel unnecessary, relentless, or poorly designed. Many school staff are already working close to capacity, with much relying on their goodwill. The DfE’s Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders (Wave 4, 2025) findings highlight the scale of the workload-control problem - 43% of teachers and leaders said their workload was not acceptable and they did not have sufficient control over it. This aligns with the Teacher Wellbeing Index 2025 headline picture too, with 76% of education staff reporting being stressed, and 81% saying they have too much to do and not enough time.

In day-to-day teacher terms, this often shows up as:

• Increased workload, i.e. planning expands, marking/feedback expectations grow, and volume multiplies without a deliberate decision about what stops
• Behaviour pressure that escalates without enough visible, reliable support, so teachers absorb the emotional and operational cost
• Cover and timetable strain that erodes protected time and normalises “just this once” as a way of operating
• SEND and inclusion complexity is rising faster than specialist capacity, training, and resourcing, leaving teachers to bridge the gap through personal sacrifice

This matters because the Wellbeing Index suggests a large proportion of staff are already operating close to the edge. When the baseline is that stretched, small frictions often become tipping points.

Why This Shapes MAT Recruitment

Recruitment is increasingly shaped by reputation and lived experience. Candidates don’t just assess the role; they assess the whole setting they’ll be stepping into.

In practice, that means they’re asking questions such as:

• Will I have protected time to plan and assess well?
• Is behaviour consistent, and is support real when it isn’t?
• Are SEND expectations realistic and properly supported?
• Are leaders consistent, or will priorities keep moving?
• Does the culture promote professional development?
• Do people stay, and if not, why?

When churn is high, applications thin. Strong candidates hesitate. People choose the Trust that seems calmer, clearer, and fairer, even if the role is similar.

Improving ITT Helps, But It Doesn't Remove Retention Risk

DfE’s initial teacher training data for 2025/26 shows a welcome improvement with secondary postgraduate ITT reaching 88% of the target, and primary reaching 126%. Although encouraging, leaders know that national improvements don’t automatically solve local shortages, subject-specific gaps, or the time it takes for trainees to become confident, stable members of staff. The goal remains the same - make your Trust somewhere teachers can do excellent work sustainably.

What Retention-Focused Culture Looks Like in Practice

High-retention Trusts tend to be more consistent with a teacher-centred approach:

1. Workload discipline with protected time: Expectations around planning, marking, meetings and other responsibilities are explicit, proportionate, and regularly reviewed. When something new is introduced, something else is deliberately removed.
2. Behaviour and inclusion support that works at classroom level: Policies are backed by routines, response capacity, and training, so teachers aren’t left managing complexity alone.
3. Consistency over constant change: Fewer initiatives, clearer sequencing, steadier implementation. Reliability beats intensity.
4. Early indicators, not post-mortems: Alongside standards metrics, leaders track what predicts attrition e.g. cover pressure, workload, behaviour incident patterns, sickness trends- so intervention happens before resignations land.
5. Development of staff through a culture of learning: Teachers and leaders need to have a supportive culture to implement their professional learning and growth, and to be able to create real changes in their classroom practice.
6. Retention Planning: Focus on wellbeing initiatives and flexible working options to reduce the attrition rate in your setting.

 The bottom line… Addressing lived experience is key

How Judicium Strategic Support Can Help

When Trusts improve retention, it’s usually because they created clearer ways of working; better role clarity, more consistent people practices, and earlier intervention when pressure points appear.

Judicium’s Strategic HR Support Service for Schools and Multi-Academy Trusts is designed to help leaders build that kind of workforce sustainability. Our approach helps you with specialist support around workforce planning, leadership development, operational efficiency, and retention and wellbeing strategies.