Teachers and teacher salaries are the two major scarce resources in the provision of education. Teacher shortage problems are common and have been a concern in nearly all countries. High teacher attritions other than retirement have called public and government attention in enhancing retention of teachers as a way to solve teacher shortage problems. The shortage of teachers varies with subjects and levels. In Hong Kong, the shortage of quality English teachers has long been a social concern because of the importance for its citizen to attain high English proficiency levels to maintain the competitiveness as an international city.
The purpose of this study is to investigate the predictors affecting the retention tendency of inservice English teachers in Hong Kong secondary schools from the labour economics perspective with a quantitative survey. Through a more thorough understanding of the predictors affecting their retention tendency, policies can be formulated with a view to enhancing the retention of English subject teachers. The survey was carried out in September, 2002. Questionnaires were sent to 111 publicly funded secondary schools in Hong Kong. A total of 490 completed questionnaires have been collected from an estimated sample size of 1332 English subject teachers in Hong Kong secondary schools. The response rate is 36.8%.
The results show that three domains of predictors: compensation structure, working conditions and personal variables affect the retention tendency of English teachers to continue teaching English. The variance explained by the whole model is 0.211.
For the domain of compensation structure, the three factors extracted from the alternative bases for paying teachers including differential pay, competencies pay and teach load pay are significant predictors of their retention tendency.
For the domain of working conditions for teachers, the results show that the classroom teaching conditions and the school support are two extracted
