This crisis is happening right at the very start of teachers’ careers. Teachers are leaving in their first year, or not starting teaching when they have completed their training.According to ATL’s analysis of the latest government figures, in 2011 just 62% of teachers who gained qualified teaching status that year were still teaching a year later.Bousted said it was “a dismal retention rate” compared with 2005 when 80% remained in teaching and just 3,600 deciding not to pursue their chosen career. Why are we losing the next generation of teachers that new blood for the profession which should be bright-eyed and bushy tailed, full of promise and ambition?Is it, I wonder, because trainee and newly qualified teachers see very early on just what teaching has become and decide that they do not want to be a part of it? Is it that they learn as they work with exhausted and stressed colleagues that teaching has become a profession which is incompatible with a normal life?