Second-Career Teachers: a study on the factors of choice of teaching as a second career. First reflections from the SecWell project

Nowadays, in the field of Teacher Education, many countries are facing teacher shortages and the problem of recruiting the required number of qualified teachers (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2018). Teacher recruitment together with the ageing teacher population are reported by international literature as serious problems for many educational systems around the world (McInerney, Ganotice, King, Marsh & Morin, 2015). As the European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice’s Report 2018 on Teaching Careers in Europe: Access, Progression and Support underlines, some subjects, more than others, together with internal areas, deal with this phenomenon, mentioned by more than half of the European educational systems. Furthermore, several countries suffer both from teacher shortages and oversupply at the same time (namely, Germany, Greece, Spain, Italy, Lithuania, Liechtenstein, and Montenegro) (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2018). With the aim of exploring the phenomenon of second career teachers, the SecWell Project - Second Career Teachers Well-being: toward non-traditional professional development strategies has been proposed by the University of xxx, Birmingham, and Cologne and funded by the European Universities Alliance EUniWell – European University for Well-Being. SecWell intends to define the state of the art on the topic of lateral entry into the teaching profession, explore the factors of choice of teaching as a second career, and identify support strategies for teachers' training and induction phases.