1 in 8 Teaching Positions in the US Are Unfilled or Filled by Unqualified Staff. This Is Happening Everywhere.

When you're grinding through a difficult term at a school that's short three staff members, it's easy to assume this is an Australian problem. A funding problem. A policy problem for this government in this country right now.

The Learning Policy Institute's 2025 factsheet puts that assumption to rest. One in eight teaching positions across the United States are either unfilled or are being covered by someone who does not hold the relevant subject qualification. In a country with 3.8 million classroom teachers, that represents hundreds of thousands of positions where students are either going without or getting a substitute.

Australia's situation is severe. England is running so short of secondary science and maths teachers that some schools have stopped offering those subjects at GCSE. Canada is reporting shortfalls across multiple provinces. New Zealand's Ministry of Education has described its teacher workforce as being in a state of ongoing crisis. The Learning Policy Institute notes that the US shortfall has persisted and deepened since the pandemic, with no credible recovery in sight under current conditions.

This is a global exodus. And it matters for how you think about your own career.

The Scale of What's Happening

The Learning Policy Institute has tracked teacher supply and demand in the United States for years. Their 2025 factsheet documents a picture that has been building for the better part of a decade.

Teacher vacancies are concentrated in the same subjects across every region: mathematics, science, special education, and English as a second language. These are not peripheral subjects. These are the courses students need to progress academically, and in many districts they're either being taught by provisional licence holders, long-term substitutes, or not taught at all.

The US figures are significant because the US education system is one of the most well-resourced in the OECD. Starting teacher salaries in many states are above Australian equivalents in real terms. Some states have invested heavily in signing bonuses, loan forgiveness schemes, and housing subsidies to attract teachers. The vacancies persist regardless.

The Learning Policy Institute's analysis of why teachers leave the profession consistently identifies the same factors across different state systems: administrative burden, loss of professional autonomy, classroom conditions including student behaviour, compensation that doesn't reflect the complexity of the role, and inadequate support for early-career teachers. These are not American problems. They are structural features of how school systems operate across English-speaking countries, and they're driving the same outcome in each of them.

England, New Zealand, Canada: The Same Pattern

England's Department for Education publishes annual data on teacher recruitment and retention. Secondary school teachers in England are leaving at the highest recorded rate in 20 years, according to 2024 data. The teacher registration body for England and Wales reports that physics, chemistry, and computing teaching vacancies are at a level where some schools have made the decision to stop offering those subjects to senior students. That is not a theoretical problem. Those are real students who will sit their GCSEs with gaps in their education.

New Zealand's situation is structurally similar to Australia's. The New Zealand Ministry of Education's workforce data from 2024 shows that approximately 1 in 5 secondary school teaching positions is being filled by a person who does not hold a full practising certificate in the relevant subject. That ratio (20% of positions filled by people without the relevant qualification) is higher than the US figure.

Canada's provincial education ministries have been issuing emergency temporary teaching licences at scale since 2022. Ontario alone issued more than 3,000 emergency licences in 2024, allowing people with no teacher training to work in classrooms while the formal teacher education pipeline catches up. It hasn't yet.

What a Profession in Structural Decline Looks Like

A profession in structural decline has a recognisable pattern. It starts with attrition outpacing entry. Then conditions worsen for remaining practitioners as they absorb the load that unfilled positions represent. Then the perception of the profession shifts in the labour market: fewer capable graduates choose it, because the conditions and compensation no longer compete with adjacent fields. Then the vacancy rate climbs, and the cycle deepens.

That pattern is what the Learning Policy Institute's data documents. It's what OECD Education at a Glance shows across its member countries. Teaching, as a profession, is in structural decline across the English-speaking world simultaneously. That's not a coincidence. It reflects shared policy choices, shared cultural narratives about the value of the work, and shared failure to match working conditions with the complexity of the job.

The implication for individual teachers is worth sitting with: staying in a profession in structural decline means the conditions around you are likely to get harder as you progress through your career. The load you're carrying today will likely be heavier in five years as fewer colleagues remain to share it. The support available to you will likely be thinner. The pay trajectory, already poor relative to comparable professional roles, will continue to lag.

None of this is about your individual situation. It's about the structural environment you're in and where it's heading.

The Opportunity for Teachers Who Can Translate Their Skills

When a profession is in structural decline, the people who benefit from that decline are the ones who recognised it early enough to build skills that are valuable outside the profession.

The irony of the global teacher exodus is that the skills teachers possess are increasingly in demand in markets outside schools. Corporate organisations are spending more on learning and development than ever before, driven by skill gaps from automation, rapid technology change, and workforce restructuring. Training organisations, edtech companies, government agencies, and large employers are all building internal capability programmes that require people who know how to design learning, deliver it, and measure whether it worked.

Teachers know how to do all of those things. The demand for those skills is growing. The gap is that most teachers haven't translated their classroom experience into the language the corporate market recognises, and many don't know that the market exists.

The roles that absorb former teachers across the US, UK, Australia, and Canada follow the same pattern: instructional design, L&D management, curriculum development, corporate training facilitation, and increasingly, AI training data design and educational AI evaluation roles. The last category is new and growing fast: companies building AI systems for education need people who understand learning, and former teachers are an obvious fit.

The Translation Gap

The biggest barrier most teachers face when they consider this transition is not skill. It's translation.

A teacher's resume lists subjects taught, year levels covered, and maybe a school leadership role. A hiring manager at a corporate L&D team reads that resume and doesn't immediately see themselves in it. The skills are there. The vocabulary is different.

This translation gap is learnable. It takes deliberate effort: understanding what skills you actually have (curriculum design, adult learning principles, facilitation, assessment, differentiation), mapping them to corporate equivalents, and building a small portfolio or credential that demonstrates you've made the translation.

Teachers who've done this work consistently report that their first interview in a new field goes well once they speak the language. The challenge is getting to that interview with materials that make the connection legible.

What the Global Picture Means for Your Individual Decision

The Learning Policy Institute data, the OECD data, and the evidence from England, New Zealand, and Canada all confirm the global teacher exodus is real and ongoing. What you do with that context is the live question.

If you're considering a transition, knowing that the exodus is global changes the emotional calculus slightly. You're not abandoning a healthy profession. You're one person making a rational choice in a profession that hundreds of thousands of people across multiple countries are making the same choice about, for the same reasons.

The profession is not served by you staying in conditions that are damaging you and getting worse. The individual students in your current classroom are served by you being present and capable while you're there, and the cleanest way to ensure that is to make your transition thoughtfully and on your own timeline rather than in crisis.

Starting the Translation

The Teach Yourself Out community exists specifically for the translation problem. Teachers who've made the move share what they did, what worked, and what they wish they'd known. The community includes people who've landed in instructional design, L&D, edtech, government, and corporate training roles across Australia, the UK, and North America.

The global data makes one thing clear: you're not alone in this, and you're not making an unusual choice. You're part of a global workforce reckoning with conditions that don't match the work, and you're looking for a more honest arrangement.

That's available. The translation is learnable. And you're not starting from zero.