This longitudinal study examines the relationship of psychosocial safety climate and psychosocial work factors with teacher turnover rates at 12- and 24-months follow-ups using objective turnover data from 14 schools in two Swedish municipalities. The study used an open cohort repeated cross-sectional research design and merged teachers’ self-reported survey data on psychosocial safety climate and psychosocial work environment factors, which were aggregated to the school level, during the first school year (n = 440) and in the second school year (n = 406), to investigate their associations with annual school-level turnover data for each school year. Given the micro–macro data situation and the few higher-level groups (n = 14 schools), school-level data were analysed using disaggregation and hierarchical regression. The findings show that differences in teacher turnover between schools were mainly explained by municipal effects and labour market dynamics rather than differences in schools’ psychosocial safety climate and psychosocial work factors.

This article explores the consequences of the occupational dynamics that have been triggered by the remodelling of the educational workforce in Sweden. Teachers’ work has become increasingly focused on teaching the curriculum, and new lower-status paraprofessional personnel are being hired to perform work that has been ‘hived off’ by teachers. The paraprofessionals enter this abandoned occupational domain of work and attempt to possess authority over it by processes of interaction, negotiation, and rhetoric. To address these occupational dynamics, we draw on data from fieldwork at three different lower secondary schools. Our findings demonstrate how social influence is coproduced by paraprofessionals in their daily interactions with their colleagues and stakeholders and how this social influence gives them access to a domain of work that is separate from teachers, creating an occupational authority that entails a dependency on the paraprofessional services. Four approaches to achieving this were found in data: (1) Creating close and nonauthoritarian working alliances with pupils, (2) producing soft power by relational ties, (3) residing in pupils’ spaces, and (4) operating as intermediary links between parties in the school. By paying attention to lower-status paraprofessionals' coproduction in social processes in which professional authority is negotiated and (re)constructed, this article has the potential to bring new insights into how contemporary processes of specialization of the teaching profession can pave the way for the emergence of a new profession in school.

This study examines the concurrent influence of health-impairment and motivational processes proposed by the Job Demands-Resource model on teachers’ intention to remain at their workplace at 12 and 24 months among 308 certified teachers in Sweden. Teachers’ perceptions of job demands (quantitative demands, emotional demands, work pace) and job resources (possibilities for development, social support from supervisor, social support from colleagues, recognition) were measured at baseline whereas exhaustion, work engagement, and retention intention were measured at 12 months and 24 months. Data was analysed using structural equation modelling and subsidiary analyses explored the moderating effects of job resources on the health-impairment process at 12 and 24 months. The findings indicate that the health-impairment process is a stronger predictor of teachers’ retention intention at 12 and 24 months than the motivational process and that the primary focus of teacher retention policies should be optimising teachers job demands rather than enhancing teachers’ job resources.

The number of teacher assistants and other support staff, commonlyreferred to as educational paraprofessionals, has grownsubstantially over the past decade in Swedish compulsory schools.Despite their widespread presence, paraprofessionals’ roles in theSwedish school context is characterised by a high degree of ambiguityas they carry out a diverse range of tasks. Given this ambiguity,we explore the construction of 58 educationalparaprofessionals’ occupational identity in a compulsory schoolsetting in Sweden. Drawing on Gary Fine’s notion of occupationalrhetorics, we argue that the rhetorics and imagery used by theseparaprofessionals to define and frame their work functions asa keyhole into their occupational identity. By analysing the occupationalrhetorics expressed in their written responses to open-endedsurvey questions about their work tasks, task preferences, andperceived illegitimate tasks we identified three distinct framingsof their work (i.e., rhetorical patterns). These distinct rhetoricalpatterns, which we describe as the rhetorics of the RelationalAnchor, Operational Facilitator and Supportive Educator, illustratehow their occupational identity is not a comprehensive whole butrather constructed through imagery that frames and defines theirwork. Delving into the rhetorics embedded in their descriptions oftheir preferred and illegitimate tasks, we find that their preferredoccupational identity and occupational positioning is tied to performingrelational tasks and inhabiting the relational space inschools. Our results illustrate the tensions paraprofessionals navigatein their construction of a meaningful occupational identity andhighlight the need to clarify the professional territory that theyoperate in within the school context.

The number of educational paraprofessionals is increasing in Swedish schools. Despite their growing presence, these support roles have gone largely unnoticed in Swedish educational research. This study addresses this gap by mapping this group through examining the frequency of their deployment, the nature of their professional titles, job duties, job requirements and employment terms using survey data collected in Swedish lower secondary schools. These data were analyzed descriptively to identify potential tendencies and variations in their deployment. The results show that the use of paraprofessional support roles is relatively widespread, with an average of one paraprofessional support staff member for every five teachers. The findings also reveal a heterogeneous and fragmented professional landscape characterized by a wide range of job titles and diverse responsibilities. Moreover, the distribution and use of paraprofessionals differs between public and private lower secondary schools and across socio-economic contexts. Finally, considerations for future research are discussed, highlighting the need for research into how this growing reliance on paraprofessional support staff affects educational outcomes, teacher roles and student support structures in lower secondary schools.

This study presented a positive deviant case: a Swedish hard-to-staff school which has had a low rate of teacher turnover over time. In line with the purpose of studying positive deviance in organisations, our exploratory inquiry was geared towards understanding how and why 'at-risk' teachers, i.e., teachers who teach in subjects which are known to have high levels of staffing difficulties in Sweden, stayed at this particular school. Using a modified grounded theory approach, our results suggested that teachers remained at the school due to being embedded in a protective professional community that was enculturated by different expressions of collegiality. Finally, these findings are discussed in relation to the theoretical concepts of teachers' job embeddedness and social capital.