Teacher Attrition In Mexico: Who Cares About English Teachers’ Well-Being?

Nallely Garza Rodríguez, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, Monterrey, México

Introduction

Teacher attrition is becoming a major concern around the world (Schaefer et al., 2012). Teacher attrition refers to the percentage of teachers leaving or changing the profession. Nowadays, being an English teacher is hard. English teachers in Mexico and around the world experience a great number of challenges, including low salary, lack of motivation, stress, excessive workload, and students’ behavioral problems. Even though many teachers quit the profession due to these causes, no one talks about the role teachers’ emotional well-being plays when teachers decide to quit teaching In the context of teaching, Viac and Fraser (2020) define teachers’ well-being as a work-related concept that includes “teachers’ responses to the cognitive, emotional, health and social conditions of their work and their profession” (p.18). In addition, Collie (2023) identified three factors that conceptualize well-being: subjective vitality(feeling excited about one’s job), behavioral engagement (feeling productive and effective) and professional growth (investing in professional development and reflection) In fact, teachers have become resilient and have learned to cope with the harsh conditions of teaching; however, after the COVID-19 pandemic, mental and emotional health have become a paramount aspect in the educational field. Unfortunately, in most cases, teachers are required to take care of their students’ emotional situations, while no one cares about teachers’ emotional well-being.

What is Happening to English Teachers in Mexico?

For decades, English teaching in Mexico has been considered a “non-professional job”, this is, because there is a stereotypical belief that anyone who knows the language can teach. I remember when I was about to take my admission exam at the university, people used to ask me what I would study. When I replied, “I will be an English teacher”, I always got the same question: “Do you really need a university degree to be an English teacher?” At that time, I did not give importance to these kinds of comments. I was highly motivated to become a language teacher, and no one would stop me from achieving my dream. As years passed, I started teaching, and this is when I realized that most teachers have to “survive” in this job.

The first problem is salary conditions. Most language teachers need to have more than 2 jobs because salaries are usually rated from $ 4 to $ 5 dollars per hour. Moreover, most of these positions are temporary, which means that when contracts end, teachers might not receive any salary for one or two months. On top of this, some institutions take more than a month to pay the teachers, forcing them to work for “free” for a certain period. Unfortunately, in Mexico, most English teachers, in public and private elementary and higher education, are not protected by fair contractual regulations, collective unions, or English educational policies to help them avoid these unstable working conditions. However, despite this scenario, teachers do their best every day to do their jobs without any recognition, except the one they receive from their students.

Another prevalent issue in language teaching is working conditions. Language institutions expect teachers not only to teach, plan, and evaluate their assigned classes, but also to do some extra unpaid administrative work, including filling reports, doing follow-ups for enrollments, calling prospective students, and sometimes even selling the institution’s courses. In many cases, teachers’ job is at stake if they fail in raising enrollment rates or sales percentages. On the other hand, in the public English National Program (PRONI and in private institutions, teachers are required to have a C1 Language certification, a TKT teaching certification, as well as to demonstrate experience and preferably a degree in language teaching. Nonetheless, they do not receive a permanent teaching position, which means not having medical service or regular payment. Moreover, in most cases, they might be responsible for teaching all the grades and groups without any material or resources.

Finally, language teachers’ burnout and lack of well-being are becoming more common and are directly related to an increase in teacher attrition rates (Arnold B., & Rahimi, 2025; Collie, 2022; Harrison, 2024; Yang, 2022). Teaching is perceived as a difficult and stressful career (Yang, 2022); the excessive number of stressors on the teaching job leads teachers to experience what is called “burnout syndrome”. Burnout is associated with symptoms such as anxiety, depression, feeling overwhelmed and frustrated, and being emotionally and physically drained, which threaten teachers’ happiness and well-being. According to Collie (2022), understanding how to support teacher well-being and how it changes over time helps reduce burnout symptoms and attrition rates. Therefore, it becomes imperative to focus on the role of teachers’ well-being by providing optimal conditions based on constructing feelings of involvement, significance, and achievements for teachers to keep on working and increase teacher retention and sustain teachers in the profession.

In conclusion, teaching is facing a global crisis, and there are more and more teachers who want to quit due to stress, low pay, lack of respect, and excessive workload (Delgado, 2019); however, no one seems to notice the effects this situation might bring to education shortly as these are critical factors in shaping teachers’ career plans and intentions to leave the profession soon. These issues negatively impact teachers' job satisfaction and emotional well-being, resulting in an overwhelming pressure not only in the execution of their work but also in the arduous task of preserving their mental and emotional health in the face of the multiple academic, economic, family, and professional demands that define their profession and their personal lives.

What can we do?

There is an urgent need to care about what teachers experience, feel, and suffer to take actions to prevent them from leaving. Promoting positive teacher well-being has huge benefits for students, teachers, and administrators (Sulis et al., 2024). First, teachers will be appreciated, valued, and engaged in quality instructional practices. Secondly, students will improve academically, study in a supportive environment, and strengthen teacher-student relationships. Finally, administrators will improve school culture, reduce teacher attrition rates, and promote teacher collaboration to reduce administrative burden. Some actions to improve teachers’ well-being are the following

• Improve teachers’ working environment
• Guarantee proper recognition of foreign language teachers’ work
• Foster a collaborative relationship between staff and parents
• Increase teachers' salaries and benefits
• Promote meaningful opportunities for professional learning and development
• Implement policies addressing the lack of space and value attributed to foreign language education
• Take teachers’ well-being seriously by providing spaces for teachers’ self-care practices

In sum, recognition of language teachers’ work, improvements in teachers' working environments, promotion of opportunities for professional development, and caring about teachers’ emotional and mental well-being are essential and need to be practiced in the workplace. It is also important that the government implements policies addressing the need for more space and value attributed to English teachers. Furthermore, school administrators should guarantee better salaries and benefits, and better mentoring and evaluation programs to increase teacher retention. Finally, taking teachers' well-being seriously to develop emotional understanding and intelligence to deal with the complex context in which education is embedded.

References

Arnold, B., & Rahimi, M. (2025). Teachers’ working conditions, wellbeing and retention: an exploratory analysis to identify the key factors associated with teachers’ intention to leave. The Australian Educational Researcher, 1-27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-024-00794-1

Collie, R. J. (2023).Teacher well-being and turnover intentions: Investigating the roles of job resources and job demands.British Journal of Educational Psychology, 93(3), 712-723 https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12587

Delgado, P. (2019). Crisis en la docencia: ¿por qué los profesores están abandonando las aulas? Observatory.https://observatorio.tec.mx/edu-news/crisis-docencia/

Schaefer, L., Long, J. S., & Clandinin, D. J. (2012). Questioning the research on early career teacher attrition and retention. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 58(1), 106–121. https://doi.org/10.11575/ajer.v58i1.55559

Harrison, K.(2024).Boosting teacher wellbeing at the start of term helps combat attrition and burnout.https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2024/02/boosting-teacher-wellbeing-at-the-start-of-term-helps-combat-attrition-and-burnout

Sulis, G., Mairitsch, A., Babic, S., Mercer, S, & Resnik, P. (2023). ELT teachers’ agency for wellbeing. ELT Journal, 78(2), 198-206. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccad050

Viac, C., & Fraser, P. (2020). Teachers’ well-being: A framework of data collection and analysis. OECD Education Working Papers, 213, 1-81. https://one.oecd.org/document/EDU/WKP(2020)1/En/pdf

Yang, H. M. (2022). English as a foreign language teachers’ well-being, their apprehension, and stress. The Mediating role of hope and optimism. Frontiers in Psychology, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.855282

Nallely Garza Rodríguez holds a doctorate in Bilingual Education granted by Texas A&M University-Kingsville. Currently, she is the coordinator of the BA program of Applied Linguistics in Teaching and Translation at UANL. She is a candidate member of the National System of Researchers (SNII) in Mexico.