Conference Program

Teacher turnover has been identified as one of the main factors in shaping teacher stratification dynamics across schools (Feng & Sass, 2017; Steele et al., 2015; Clotfelter, Ladd & Vigdor, 2011). International literature has consistently shown that teacher turnover does not affect all schools uniformly but rather tends to have a greater impact on schools that concentrate students from socioeconomically disadvantaged or migrant backgrounds, with higher poverty rates and lower academic performance, which systematically exhibit higher turnover rates than more socially advantaged schools (Sorensen & Ladd, 2020; Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2019; Allen, Burgess & Mayo, 2017; Barbieri, Rossetti & Sestito, 2011). These schools face persistent challenges in retaining highly qualified teachers and in consolidating stable teaching staff, which contributes to intensifying educational inequality between schools (Ferrer-Esteban et al., 2025; Ingersoll et al., 2019). In the case of Catalonia, although teacher turnover is widespread across the education system, available evidence indicates that it is particularly concentrated in schools with high levels of social vulnerability (Ferrer-Esteban et al., 2025). However, the analysis of this phenomenon has traditionally been examined through annual measures that provide a short-term approximation of teacher turnover, thereby limiting understanding of the temporal dimension of turnover processes and of sustained patterns of staff instability over time.

The aim of this research is to deepen the analysis of the relationship between teacher turnover and the social composition of schools in Catalonia, adopting a longitudinal perspective that enables teacher turnover to be examined as a cumulative process of staff instability over successive years. The study draws on Holme et al. (2018), who propose approaching teacher turnover beyond annual rates and conceptualising it as a process that manifests in different patterns of instability measured through longitudinal indicators. Methodologically, this study employs a quantitative approach based on the analysis of official administrative data from the Department of Education of Catalan Government, covering seven academic years (2018-2019 to 2024-2025). Through the construction and application of longitudinal indicators of teacher turnover, the study identifies not only the profiles of schools with high turnover rates, but also distinct underlying patterns of instability, distinguishing between situations of chronic instability, cumulative instability, isolated episodes, or intermittent dynamics. The analysis examines how these patterns of instability are distributed across schools according to their social composition and students’ level of vulnerability, thereby enabling the identification of schools facing significant challenges in retaining teachers. The research findings capture prolonged trajectories of disadvantage experienced by schools, most of which are concentrated in the lower percentiles, and provide new evidence on how the persistence of teacher turnover in contexts of social vulnerability constrains these schools’ capacity to consolidate qualified and stable teaching staff, thereby reinforcing patterns of teacher stratification and contributing to the reproduction of educational inequalities in contexts of school segregation.