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This article was downloaded by: [Tufts University] On: 12 November 2014, At: 14:23 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of Vocational Education & Training Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjve20 The pursuit of ‘excellence’: mentoring in further education initial teacher training in England Michael Tedder a & Robert Lawy a a Graduate School of Education , University of Exeter , Exeter, UK Published online: 07 Dec 2009. To cite this article: Michael Tedder & Robert Lawy (2009) The pursuit of ‘excellence’: mentoring in further education initial teacher training in England, Journal of Vocational Education & Training, 61:4, 413-429, DOI: 10.1080/13636820903363634 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13636820903363634 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions

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Page 1: The pursuit of ‘excellence’: mentoring in further education initial teacher training in England

This article was downloaded by: [Tufts University]On: 12 November 2014, At: 14:23Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Vocational Education &TrainingPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjve20

The pursuit of ‘excellence’: mentoringin further education initial teachertraining in EnglandMichael Tedder a & Robert Lawy aa Graduate School of Education , University of Exeter , Exeter, UKPublished online: 07 Dec 2009.

To cite this article: Michael Tedder & Robert Lawy (2009) The pursuit of ‘excellence’: mentoringin further education initial teacher training in England, Journal of Vocational Education & Training,61:4, 413-429, DOI: 10.1080/13636820903363634

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13636820903363634

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: The pursuit of ‘excellence’: mentoring in further education initial teacher training in England

Journal of Vocational Education and TrainingVol. 61, No. 4, December 2009, 413–429

ISSN 1363-6820 print/ISSN 1747-5090 online© 2009 The Vocational Aspect of Education LtdDOI: 10.1080/13636820903363634http://www.informaworld.com

The pursuit of ‘excellence’: mentoring in further education initial teacher training in England

Michael Tedder* and Robert Lawy

Graduate School of Education, University of Exeter, Exeter, UKTaylor and FrancisRJVE_A_436541.sgm(Received 9 April 2009; final version received 5 August 2009)10.1080/13636820903363634Journal of Vocational Education and Training0729-4360 (print)/1469-8366 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & Francis614000000December [email protected]

Mentoring has become established as a central feature of initial teacher trainingprogrammes in English further education (FE) yet there remains a lack of claritywithin the sector about what mentoring should mean. The direction of governmentreforms has been to make mentoring part of the formal assessment of traineeteachers against national standards, and the Office for Standards in Education(Ofsted) inspection reports emphasise an approach to mentoring that is target-driven and judgemental. Official rhetoric uses the language of ‘excellence’ or‘best practice’. However, mentoring literature reveals a range of possible models,and research into mentoring practices within colleges suggests there is a diversityof ideas and approaches, many of which emphasise the developmental characterof good mentoring. In this paper we analyse some of the tensions and uncertaintythat surround mentoring and reflect on their significance for teachers andmanagers in the development of initial teacher training in the sector.

Keywords: mentor; mentoring; further education; teacher training

Introduction

Mentoring has become part of the lexicon of teacher training in the English furthereducation (FE) sector1 in recent years, yet there remains a lack of clarity about whatit should mean. There has been a shift away from informal and largely non-systema-tised approaches towards more formalised approaches where mentoring systems andstructures have become used as part of the assessment of trainee teachers. This shifttowards a model that incorporates an element of assessment, mirrors earlier changeswithin the school sector where a subject mentor role has featured as an important andintegral part of teacher training programmes for many years.

In this paper we make use of data from a research project in further education toexplore what it means for trainees, tutors and managers to take part in reformed train-ing programmes where mentoring has become an essential feature. There are threemain sections. We begin with a consideration of the regulatory context of furthereducation teacher training, tracing how mentoring has become embedded inprogrammes, before considering models of mentoring that have become influential onpractice. We raise a number of policy-related questions as well as pedagogical andvalue-related issues. In the second part of the paper, we present some findings from aproject in which we interviewed trainees, tutors and managers about their mentoring

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

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414 M. Tedder and R. Lawy

experiences in the year following the introduction of the most recent reforms (Life-long Learning UK (LLUK) 2007a, 2007b). In the third part of the article, we discusssome of the issues and problems that have come to prominence as a result of thereforms and suggest there are underlying tensions in current provision.

The regulatory context

Within the UK, and particularly in England, there has been a paradigm shift in teachereducation (Lawy and Tedder 2009b) evident in profound changes in the control andregulation of teacher training for the further education sector. These changes have notoccurred in isolation but are part of a wider agenda (Ainley and Bailey 1997) whichover the past 30 years, has seen the reduction of teacher control over the curriculum(Dale 1989) and increasing surveillance over teacher training programmes throughregimes of inspection and review.

Until relatively recently, teacher trainers in FE were able to design and imple-ment teaching programmes with minimum interference from external regulation.Course structures and accreditation were framed by awarding bodies such as Cityand Guilds and EdExcel or by universities at graduate and postgraduate level.During the early 1990s there were attempts to produce competence statements ofdesirable performance for teachers that were consistent in format with NationalVocational Qualifications (NVQs). Units of assessment produced by the Trainingand Development Lead Body (TDLB) were used to structure non-universityprogrammes. (Chown 1992; Chown and Last 1993; Hodkinson 1992; Hyland 1994;Young 2008).

In 1999, the Further Education National Training Organisation (FENTO) wascharged with introducing a different approach to national standards after undertakingconsultation with practitioners across the sector. These standards were required:

● To inform the design of accredited awards for FE teachers.● To provide standards to inform professional development activity.● To assist institution-based activities such as recruitment, appraisal and the iden-

tification of training needs. (FENTO 1999, 1)

An influential survey from the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted 2003) iden-tified great variability in the way the standards were understood and interpreted. Thiswas confirmed by Nasta (2007) who found that the FENTO standards did not changethe practices of the universities and awarding bodies involved in the provision ofprogrammes since they were able to resist the increased prescription that the standardswere meant to support. Some of the main criticisms were directed towards the lack ofsystematic mentoring and support in the workplace:

The current system of FE teacher training does not provide a satisfactory foundation ofprofessional development for FE teachers at the start of their careers … While the tuitionthat trainees receive on the taught elements of their courses is generally good, few oppor-tunities are provided for trainees to learn how to teach their specialist subjects, and thereis a lack of systematic mentoring and support in the workplace. (Ofsted 2003)

That report led to the recommendation for workplace mentoring of teachers in thereport Equipping our teachers for the future (DfES 2004):

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Journal of Vocational Education and Training 415

an essential aim of the training is that teachers should have the skills of teaching in theirown specialist or curriculum area … Subject specific skills must be acquired in the teach-ers’ workplace and from vocational or academic experience. Mentoring, either by linemanagers, subject experts or experienced teachers in related curriculum areas, is essen-tial. (DfES 2004, para. 3.6)

The White Paper, Further education: Raising skills, improving life chances (DfES2006) outlined how a new licentiate qualification of Qualified Teacher in Learningand Skills (QTLS) would work. Lifelong Learning UK2 undertook the task ofconstructing a set of revised standards (LLUK 2007a, 2007b) that were tighter andmore prescriptive than the FENTO standards. Subsequently there has been theintroduction of a raft of teacher qualifications (identified through the acronymsPTLLS (Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector), CTLLS (Certificate inTeaching in the Lifelong Learning Sector) and DTLLS (Diploma in Teaching in theLifelong Learning Sector) that are ostensibly designed to meet the various profes-sional needs of those in different teaching or training situations throughout furthereducation and lifelong learning. These awards are certificated by City and Guildsand EdExcel and are referred to as National Awarding Body (NAB) provision.Higher education institutions have found it necessary to review their partnershipswith colleges (Cullimore 2006), to consider such issues as how to incorporate theLLUK standards in their programmes and whether NAB awards can articulate withthem.

With the LLUK standards, programmes of teacher training are now directedtowards ensuring that trainees meet a set of requirements specified in terms of stan-dards and these include demonstration of an appropriate level of achievement of the‘minimum core’ of literacy, numeracy and information technology (IT) skills. Traineesare directed also to a more specifically-targeted subject training or pedagogy and it ishere that mentoring has become significant with the expectation that a mentor shouldbe appointed for every trainee.

Contested models of mentoring

The Association of Colleges (AoC) and FENTO were commissioned by the FE Fund-ing Council to undertake research and development focussed on ‘excellence’ in teach-ing and the way that mentoring might contribute to developing ‘excellence’. Therewas consultation with 700 learners, 70 teachers and 7 college leaders in 29 collegesand the resulting publication, Mentoring towards excellence (AoC and FENTO 2001),had the purpose of identifying and sharing good practices and procedures across thesector. Guidelines and activities were published designed to enable college staff todevelop policies and processes that would be effective in improving mentoring prac-tice. The FENTO standards were presented as central to this process.

The publication presents a detailed guide to mentoring policy and procedures basedon practices found in further education at the time and it contributed to staff develop-ment activities in many colleges. There was little explicit discussion within the publi-cation of what exactly the purpose of mentoring should be although there appeared tobe a consensus that mentoring could make a contribution to improving the quality ofteaching and supporting learning. In the pursuit of ‘excellence’ it was assumed that allteachers in further education – full and part-time as well as agency and supply teachers– would benefit from a mentoring relationship with a fellow professional. Crucially,Mentoring towards excellence was formative and developmental in tone and

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416 M. Tedder and R. Lawy

emphasised good mentoring relationships. Among 10 key recommendations from thestudy, the first encapsulated the consensus that:

Mentoring should be developed and promoted as a supportive and developmentalprocess. (AoC and FENTO 2001, Introductory Booklet 8)

More recently, other writers have continued to offer the FE sector practical guidancethat supports a model of mentoring as a developmental process within professionalpractice. Thus Rhodes, Stokes, and Hampton (2004) relate mentoring on the onehand to coaching but also to peer networks as an inherent feature of professionalpractice:

In essence, both coaching and mentoring are complex activities closely associated withthe support of individual learning. Mentoring implies an extended relationship involvingadditional behaviour such as counselling and professional friendship … Peer-networkingimplies the facility to work together productively with other colleagues so as to learnfrom them or with them. Successful networking relationships are at the heart of coachingand mentoring. (Rhodes, Stokes, and Hampton 2004, 12)

Wallace and Gravells (2005), and Klasen and Clutterbuck (2002) similarly attempt tolocate mentoring with other professional practices in teaching, such as counselling andnetworking, and they particularly emphasise the importance of a caring, nurturingrelationship with the mentor acting as a role model:

Helping someone with their emotional needs, without any preconceived idea of thedesired outcome, most of us would recognise as counselling … A more directive formof psychological and emotional support may involve the helper offering advice oracting as a role model, taking a younger, less experienced colleague under their wing.This caring role is what many people might regard as a common form of mentoring.Finally we have a less directive form of developmental help than coaching, here calledfacilitating, but which could equally be called networking. (Wallace and Gravells2005, 13)

A substantial contribution to recent theorisation of mentoring in post-compulsoryeducation was made by Helen Colley (2003) from research that explored systems of‘engagement mentoring’ with young people. She found that people value relationshipsthat they can choose and negotiate for themselves and that they use the opportunitiesprovided to develop such relationships in constructive and creative ways. Two aspectsof her research are of particular relevance to our current purpose: firstly, in herresearch Colley found no clarity or consensus about what the term ‘mentor’ meansalthough she notes that discourses about mentoring tend to concentrate either on thefunctions of mentors or on the qualities of the relationship between mentors and ment-ees; secondly, she offers a valuable insight into the changes that occur within amentoring relationship if it moves from a dyadic or simple, two-way partnershipbetween mentor and mentee, to a triadic relationship that serves the needs of a thirdparty (Gay and Stephenson 1998).

While there has been a growing body of work that explores the complexities ofmentoring that share the formative and developmental aspirations of Mentoringtowards excellence, there is an interesting shift in tone and emphasis elsewhere. Forexample, Keeley-Browne (2007) in addressing new teacher trainees in the learningand skills sector adopts a directive stance that:

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Journal of Vocational Education and Training 417

As part of your training you will be allocated to a mentor, or learning coach, who willadvise you on the general skills of training to teach [sic]. Your mentor will be skilled inwhat is called the pedagogy of the classroom. You will also be given access to a subjectspecialist coach (this may be the same person as your mentor/learning coach) who willhelp you develop the skills that are specific to your areas of the curriculum. (Keeley-Browne 2007, 9)

The model is one in which a mentor is allocated to a trainee to advise on general skills,on ‘the pedagogy of the classroom’ and on subject issues. A set of functional respon-sibilities is identified for the mentor that she or he should:

● Help to induct you into the teaching area and institution.● Provide a varied and appropriate programme of developmental experiences for

you.● Observe, evaluate and review your work, providing you with feedback designed

to help you improve.● Liaise with others involved in your training. (Keeley-Browne 2007, 50)

Cullimore and Simmons (2008) have traced the way that successive Ofsted Reports(2006, 2007, 2008) have expressed a growing expectation that tutors and mentorsshould be engaged in processes of making judgements about trainees against stan-dards. There are consistent criticisms about ‘confusion’ of assessment roles, ‘failure’by teacher trainers (Ofsted 2007) and mentors (Ofsted 2008) to define pass or failboundaries, insufficient attention to action planning and setting targets. Rather thanengaging in a professional discussion with trainees in a way that recognises the prob-lematic character of teacher practices, the role of mentors and teacher trainers hasshifted to one where they are required to ensure that the trainees write action plans toset targets that can become evidence of the achievement of LLUK standards. There isa move away from the developmental model underpinning Mentoring for excellenceand towards a model that is more judgemental but is favoured by agencies likeOfsted.

Such developments present important questions that we address in this paperthrough exploring the perceptions and orientations of a small group of trainees, tutorsand managers who were directly involved in a process of teacher training. We areinterested in considering whether mentoring should have primarily a developmentalpurpose. Is it a process that can be undertaken with openness, honesty and flexibilityand, if necessary, in confidence? Alternatively, should mentoring have a judgementalpurpose? Is it a process to be undertaken to ensure public confidence in the perfor-mance of professionals in public service? Is it possible for mentoring systems andstructures to combine elements of development and judgement successfully or arethey mutually incompatible?

A research project

Our research comprised a study in the south-west of England of the impact and effec-tiveness of mentoring and individual learning plans within the new trainingprogrammes (Lawy and Tedder 2009a). The project was part of a series funded byCentres for Excellence in Teacher Training (CETTs)3 designed to monitor and supportthe changed regulations (DfES 2006) governing the initial training and continuingprofessional development of teachers in the learning and skills sector.

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418 M. Tedder and R. Lawy

The research methods comprised semi-structured interviews with a number oftrainees, teachers and managers who could offer contrasting perspectives on theirparticipation in contemporary training schemes. Twenty-eight interviews were under-taken in the early months of 2008; the research team collected rich qualitative datafrom ten trainees, from nine teacher educators who fulfil roles as tutors and/or mentorsin programmes and also from nine managers, some working in FE colleges and somein other community organisations. In making judgements about who to include in theresearch we sought to include trainees on university and NAB programmes, on fulland part-time courses. We sought a gender balance reflecting the composition of theFE workforce. The tutors and managers were also chosen to reflect the diversity ofprogrammes, responsibilities and experience. We included managers in work andcommunity-based settings together with those in mainstream FE colleges although theinterviews in the discussion that follows were undertaken primarily with college-based staff and trainees.

Data analysis used a life history or biographical methodology in order to locate thenarratives of interviewees within a wide personal and social context (Alheit 2005;Biesta and Tedder 2008; Goodson and Sikes 2001; Tedder and Biesta 2009; Westet al. 2007). Alheit (2005) defines biographical learning as:

a self-willed, ‘autopoietic’ accomplishment on the part of active subjects, in which theyreflexively ‘organise’ their experience in such a way that they also generate personalcoherence, identity, a meaning to their life history and a communicable, socially viablelifeworld perspective for guiding their actions. (Alheit 2005, 9)

The importance of this statement lies in its recognition of the personal within thesocial: on the one hand it asserts the social situatedness of individual reflection but italso emphasises for each person the relationship between reflection, identity andpersonal agency.

Our ethnographic approach to both data collection and analysis was intended toenable us to go beyond answering narrowly technical questions about mentoring prac-tices to convey something of what mentoring had meant for our interviewees in theirpersonal and professional development. Becoming a teacher for most trainees is asignificant change in identity and we were interested in the ways in which experienceand reflection on experience features within processes of restructuring the profes-sional self. The work of Jerome Bruner (1991, 2002) underpins much educationalwriting that argues the connection between telling life stories and the creation of iden-tity. Bruner’s contention is that human readiness for meaning is innately narrative, thatnarrative is ubiquitous in human culture. Human beings share a narrative mode ofunderstanding our lives and the world around us that gives us the possibilities formultiple realities, persuades us that other ‘possible worlds’ exist. In other words,narrative is inextricably related to learning about the self and telling stories is a wayof constructing identity:

[W]e constantly construct and reconstruct ourselves to meet the needs of the situationswe encounter and we do so with the guidance of our memories of the past and our hopesand fears about the future. Telling oneself about oneself is like making up a story aboutwho and what we are, what’s happened and why we’re doing what we’re doing. (Bruner2002, 64)

For such reasons, the collection of narrative data and a biographical approach to theproject was well-suited to our purpose of seeking to understand differing perspectives

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Journal of Vocational Education and Training 419

on the significance of mentoring. The cases that we report here represent some of thediversity that we encountered within our groupings of managers, tutors and traineesbut we have also been able to capture issues of common concern. All the names usedin the next section are pseudonyms.

Findings

Managers’ perspectives

The four managers (three women and one man) we describe here were employed inFE colleges and had responsibility for the quality of teaching and learning in theirinstitutions. Their responsibility for related spheres of college activity, such as staffdevelopment or human resources, varied between colleges and, indeed, varied foreach individual from year to year.

Two of our managers (Angela and Andrew) had been extensively involved in theAoC–FENTO study and had contributed actively to the policies and practices aboutmentoring pursued by their respective colleges. Angela was in her 50s and had morethan 25 years experience in further education. She emphasised the importance of rela-tionships and facilitation in mentoring and expressed doubt that it was important for amentor and mentee to have shared subject knowledge:

[T]he first issue [is] whether or not the person who actually mentors you is from the samespecialist area. But does that matter? I mean my feelings, my take on mentoring, is verymuch that a mentor can only be effective … if there’s a healthy communication betweenthe two.

Angela argued the difference between mentoring and other kinds of professionalsupport that we find in the literature (Wallace and Gravells 2005):

[A] coach is one who says you know maybe, ‘This is how it, this is how it ought to bedone, you know, give it a try and see’, or you know, in that sort of context. Whereas amentor is someone who says, ‘Well how do you think you will best achieve that?’

She implied that a coach might be expected to be definitive or authoritative in her areaof expertise while a mentor would explore possibilities and recognise the contestednature of much professional practice.

Andrew was close to retirement and had many years experience of teaching in aspecific subject area and in teacher education, with a more recent role in qualitymanagement:

the new standards have made absolutely clear that [pause] to reach a professional levelof teaching one’s own subject and mediating one’s own subject for learning is animportant strand …(a process) supported by a proper mentoring system, struck one asboth overdue and very necessary.

He was therefore sympathetic to the idea of addressing subject-specific issues throughmentoring but he saw the role as wide-ranging and encompassing a notion of advo-cacy. For Andrew the mentoring role was critical and he saw it as a supporting struc-ture for the development of a professional identity with a community of practice (Laveand Wenger 1991). He said:

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420 M. Tedder and R. Lawy

[Our college mentors] had a number of things they had to do including informal classroomobservation, being available to the mentee, make sure that they were comfortable in theirsubjects with the professionalism, make sure they got the development opportunities asthey needed and the quid pro quo was the person doing the mentoring would be remittedfor twenty, twenty-eight, twenty-five hours of their eventual time.

Andrew was conscious of the need for the mentoring role to be tailored to the individ-ual needs of the trainees. For example, he questioned its appropriateness for all train-ees, noting how teachers who had been in post for several years already haveconsiderable experience in dealing with their subject and had extensive opportunitiesto learn about resources and specific curriculum matters: ‘they understand theirsubject very well … better than actually sometimes they understand teaching andlearning.’

Claire was another manager with more than two decades of teaching and managingexperience at a third college and she responded to our questions with specific exam-ples of the care and support she offered to struggling trainees, such as help in buildingconfidence and in demystifying course demands. Reflecting on her personal experi-ences of being mentored, Claire emphasised the importance of a good relationship thatshe contrasted with a line management role:

[G]oing back to the mentoring, yep you need a buddy. You need that colleague; you needsomebody who can say, ‘Well, that was rubbish wasn’t it?’ You say, ‘Yea it wasrubbish!’ You also need someone to keep you going if, you know, to jolly you along andsay, ‘Oh, keep, you know, nearly half-term’ sort of thing. Yes you need the professionalstandards, we need somebody who’s going to make a judgement on you and that’s myline-manager.

Our fourth manager, Dawn, referred to standards, but not to a set of prescribed stan-dards that trainees are expected to achieve but rather the expectations she had of hertrainees. Asked about mentors in her work experience she recalled:

When I qualified I worked with a ward sister who was probably old fashioned … if youcompare her with today, but actually she was very inspiring because her standards werevery high, her expectations were very high, education was seen as part of that role.

The managers drew attention to a complication of mentoring provision in the way thatit relates to other college systems of quality assurance and professional support thatfeature in the learning culture of a college. Contrasts between the different practicesof different colleges emerged vividly in discussions around the position of advancedteachers.4

Andrew expressed the expectation that advanced teachers in his college would beregular members of the teacher training team:

We want an [advanced teacher] to be able to generalise their own experiences of beingexpert at their subject, to be able to take it to others in development sessions, inmentoring, in observations across the college and in working with the, with the teachereducation team.

Angela reported that they had tried the same approach in her college but had beenunsuccessful:

Our best practitioners teaching on our teacher training courses! and, do you know, theyhated it. They absolutely hated it and it, it was, it was a big surprise to me …. They

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Journal of Vocational Education and Training 421

weren’t there to simply demonstrate how good they are at teaching science or hairdress-ing or history … their core subjects, they were there to teach this other curriculum.

Claire expressed frustration: she has line management responsibility for the advancedteachers and has respect for their teaching abilities but finds them hard to manage:

We have a model where our [advanced teachers] are purely supportive and they are allmy colleagues … a new member of staff arrives and they will have their mentor’ssupport … They are delightful people, very very good teachers, but there is somethingwrong in the chemistry. I don’t know why, I can’t pin it down. I wonder if it’s becausethey’re not making judgements?

Tutors’ perspectives

In distinguishing between managers and tutors, we have assumed that managers areresponsible for a range of programmes and/or have other college responsibilities andthat tutors are responsible for no more than a single programme or module. In present-ing the views of tutors we again report on four cases of people who exemplify someimportant differences but also reflect some issues and concerns that they shared.

Gill had science qualifications and many years experience in teacher education.She recalled her experience of support from a respected head of science:

I had a really good manager at [my previous college]. I mean a really superb managerwho managed me as a teacher in the very best possible way you could ever do. He chal-lenged me, he set me targets, constantly monitored what I was doing, gave me hugeamounts of feedback, very detailed feedback about what I was doing and how I couldimprove, allowed me to use him as a sounding board.

Gill saw the good mentor as using similar practices:

It is about challenging. It’s not about being a friend. It’s not about placating people andsaying, ‘Yes you’re wonderful and you know, how can I help?’ It’s about challenging …if I tutor people, it’s my job to give them the solutions … whereas mentoring is veryabout equality and about being critical and being, you know, ‘Have you thought about,what do you mean by that’ or those sort of things. Opening doors but not pushing peoplethrough them [laughs].

Emily is of similar age to Gill though much less experienced in supporting traineesand she commented that the mentor is ‘a subject person in education to support peoplewithin their actual teaching’ but wondered whether the mentor is a mentor ‘in thesubject as such’. It seemed to be her view that the subject mentor’s role was to makea summative judgement about subject competence but that such expertise would thenqualify them to contribute more formatively to the teacher training.

Christopher has recently become involved in teacher education, after many yearsof experience of teaching in a university as well as in colleges, and he was one of ourrespondents who talked of the importance of ‘being passionate’:

My tutor for [my teaching qualification] the 74075 said to me, you know, ‘you are obvi-ously quite passionate about education, you’re quite passionate about the subject,’ shesaid, ‘have you ever thought of going into teacher training?’

He was asked how mentoring differed from tutoring students or other forms ofteaching:

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well it’s different in as much as I suppose it’s not about course, it’s not about theacademic work, it’s about their job, it’s about their role, it’s about what’s working andwhat isn’t working with their role.

Thus he emphasised mentoring as induction into the workplace, a general mentoringrather than a subject-specific undertaking.

Janet is a programme leader who spent many years in training and curriculumdevelopment outside of a college before studying for a Certificate in Education qual-ification. She was another who described how other people had been inspirational inher field and crucial to making her the practitioner she is today. In her course sherecalled a friendship with a man who became her ‘course buddy’:

I mean it was pure luck but it worked, really worked ‘cos he is incredibly grounded andsensible and focused and you can see what I’m like! And, and I was able to sort of, Idon’t know, I was able to bring a bit a life to the partnership.

By way of comparison, she spoke negatively of a more bureaucratic procedure whenshe was recruited to her college, commenting:

They gave me somebody whom I thought ‘I’m not going to her anyway’ you know …she may know a bit more than me, but I wouldn’t want to be seen to be asking her!

Janet pointed out that a significant amount of mentor-like work occurs through herrole as course manager which may or may not get recorded in course files, and almostcertainly does not find its way to her trainee’s record of mentoring:

If we’re talking, if we’re talking about the actual subjects, the, the, you know, the coursethat we’re teaching, that is something that I consider as part of my role as course manager… I do that with all the lecturers, so I don’t even think about it as being mentoring. …so we are always talking about, you know, how they’re getting [on] with the unit andwhat this bit of paper, what this bit of writing means, you know, what they’re expectedto do here. What’s the difference between this level and that level.

Trainees’ perspectives

We were conscious in eliciting the views of trainee teachers that the cohort is wideranging: we interviewed young graduates undertaking the full-time pre-service PGCEprogramme; there were also experienced part-time and full-time staff undertaking thePGCE part-time programme and others undertaking NAB programmes. We representthis diversity briefly by focusing on four participants, three men and one woman.

Edward, a trainee in his 40s, led a successful career in engineering and manage-ment before joining a full-time PGCE course to become a teacher and recalled hisexperiences of mentoring as a senior manager in industry:

Whenever I’ve coached or mentored people I’ve always gone deep, let them get to pointwhere they don’t know something, they’re not sure of something, a contradiction or, youknow, ignorance, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ‘Stop, make a note, that’syour objective for the next one. I want to know what that means and you’re going toexplain it to me and you have a week to do so. Okay? Right, do you want to carry on ordo you want to stop?’

Clearly he was a trainee with a developed sense of what mentoring could be. Edwardwas not impressed by his appointed subject mentor and, in many ways, he exemplified

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the position taken by the manager, Andrew, about the need to tailor mentoring provi-sion to the needs of the individual and not to utilise a ‘one size fits all’ strategy.

A more favourable impression of mentoring provision was gained from a youngertrainee, Graham, who had recently moved from the catering industry to a FE collegeafter deciding that he could best use his passion for teaching about food inside acollege. He had recently started a diploma in-service training course (DTLLS). Whenasked what he thought were the qualities of a good mentor he reflected on his ownexperience of working with a mentor without once referring to subject expertise:

Well, they’ve got to be accessible. If you’ve got a mentor that you can’t get hold of it’sa very difficult thing. So I’m guessing to be nice but to be honest and straight down theline so you know what you’re expected, obviously they can’t be a scary person becauseyou wouldn’t feel comfortable … I guess that the biggest thing that I’d have to say from[tutor name] is that she’s really, really passionate about teaching and I’m guessing thata mentor has to be passionate about what they do.

Kate and Ian are two young teachers who were taking the first year of a PGCE courseon a part-time basis at different colleges and they gave us some insight into the work-ing of mentoring for them. Kate has a creative arts background and talked of the needfor a mentor to have ‘passion and enthusiasm, I mean that’s the main thing’. She hadasked for a particular staff member to be her mentor because she found his work andteaching inspirational. However, Kate was allocated to another mentor who was amember of staff in the same college department but with a very different subjectspecialism in media. She found him ‘a nice man’ and ‘an approachable person’ but notreally a help in the development of her teaching abilities.

Ian teaches outdoor education and, like Kate, had someone in the same collegedepartment appointed as a mentor. In Ian’s case, however, he thought his mentor wasan appropriate choice: the two of them teach groups together and have the opportunityboth to plan and evaluate their shared sessions. Ian commented:

[H]e gets really, really good grades from Ofsted and I love his teaching style and I’ve –the personality behind it, the passion that he’s got. It’s, it’s really good and he’s beengreat with regards to information that he’s given me, the feedback that he gives me. Wesee each other, you know, at least once a week, anyway because I’m in his lecture, wedo lectures together and we get five, ten minutes after, five, ten minutes before.

Discussion

What emerged from our interviews was that there is no simple or consistent under-standing of what ‘mentoring’ means to our participants, even if they had undertakensome form of mentor training and development or had experience of mentoring activ-ities. Our participants are not confused about mentoring as individuals: there are manynotions of what it could be that are sanctioned by different theoretical models and bytheir experience. However, our data suggest that such variety of interpretation aboutmentoring means that it is a contested concept and this contributes to a situation incolleges and in teacher training that is complex and potentially confusing.

This section presents an analysis of some of the strands that contribute to thissituation: we do this firstly by considering what was understood about the quality ofrelationships in mentoring and secondly by reviewing some of the functions that wereassociated with mentoring, functions that included induction into an institution,induction into a subject area and induction into the teaching profession.

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The valuing of relationships

Our interview data showed how past experiences were important in structuring ideasabout what mentoring could or should offer. We heard stories from all our participantsof ways they had become professionals in other fields – as artist, as engineer, as nurse,as hairdresser – before making the transition to becoming a teacher. We found thatmost (though it is important to stress, not all) of our participants were able to tellstories of people from their past who had been inspirational for their personal devel-opment within different professions. Usually these stories did not use terms like‘mentor’ or ‘mentoring’ but they revealed how our participants have constructed theirideas about mentoring and thereby created their expectations of what it should mean.

We found that mentoring occurs very successfully informally among friends andcolleagues. Laker, Laker, and Lea (2008), in discussing sources of support for pre-service school teachers noted that the support they most valued was ‘immediate, rele-vant, collaborative, contextual and non-threatening’ and the least threatening of allsources of support and the most easily given and received was from other pre-serviceteachers in social situations. Our stories confirmed the value in FE teacher training ofinformal arrangements, of contacts with peers and ‘buddies’, but they also revealedthe range of ways in which mentoring occurs successfully with colleagues and linemanagers in formal educational systems, such as in programme team meetings.

The tutors and managers in our project affirmed the importance of communicationand the quality of relationship established between mentor and mentee and indicatedthat it was more significant to successful mentoring than the subject qualification ofthe mentor or any subject-specialist mentoring. With the trainees, there were differ-ences in opinion: some new teachers (such as Kate and Ian), were recent graduates intheir subject who expected to be mentored by someone who was identifiably a subjectexpert. It is hardly surprising that they would be looking for someone senior whowould have knowledge or experience in common. Older and more experienced train-ees, however, such as Edward, were more likely to value general mentoring supportto become successful teachers (Robinson 2005).

Our data suggest that all our participants valued relationships with people that theyadmire, people who have a ‘passion’ for what they do and are ‘passionate aboutteaching’ (needless to say, you will search in vain for any reference to ‘passion’ instatements of national standards). Some spoke of inspirational mentors who took timeout to provide them with support. It was striking how references to ‘high standards’came in stories that told of inspirational people and the suggestion that a mentorshould be able to ‘challenge’ a mentee and convey ‘high expectations’. Effectivetarget setting, therefore, comes from within a professional relationship rather thanfrom a document-driven process; it seemed that externally-defined standards wererather less important to our trainees than the standards that can be conveyed betweencolleagues in the same community of practice. As we have seen, none of the partici-pants in our research drew a direct link between their practices and the efficacy oftarget-setting and action plans based on documented standards; they were nonethelessconcerned to understand what it means to achieve excellence in teaching.

Complexity of functions

The stories told by our participants gave insight into the functions achieved throughmentoring and we found that they talked about support through three types of transi-tion: induction into an organisation or institution, induction into a subject area and

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induction into the teaching profession. Different kinds of transition make differentkinds of demands on mentoring.

The first type of transition is induction into an organisation, introducing anewcomer to a particular course team or department or school. Mentoring policies inFE usually form part of a commitment by the institution for all new staff in a college.Cunningham (2007) argues the need for an appropriate ‘architecture’ in colleges tosupport teachers acting as mentors. Mentoring would enable a trainee to becomefamiliar with the resources that are available, the customs and practices of particularlocations and with the range of staff who are colleagues.

However, the situation is complicated by the existence of other systems in collegessuch as the functioning of advanced teachers. Different colleges make use of such staffin different ways and this has an impact on the provision of mentoring for teachertraining. We found that the character of support from advanced teachers was mediatedby the learning culture(s) of the organisation itself. Mentoring raises issues for collegemanagers in sorting out roles and responsibilities, how roles like advanced teachersand subject learning coaches should relate to mentoring functions within teachertraining.

Colleges are in a state of flux with their mentoring provision for teacher training.Our research showed that some trainees have mentors where an excellent personalrelationship had developed and the mentor made a valued contribution to a trainee’spersonal and professional development while other trainees had mentors whoachieved such functions only partially. The solution to this problem is unlikely to bea simplistic recommendation, such as appointing a subject-specific mentor to addressevery need, but recognition of a range of formal and informal possibilities forsupporting trainees.

Secondly, there is induction into becoming a subject specialist and mentoring thatsupports a novice in meeting the specific demands of a particular subject area. Ourresearch showed that, even among our small sample of interviewees, there was noagreed view of what a ‘subject specialist’ should be. One tutor thought that havingsomeone available with a higher level of expertise or qualification in a subject meantthey would then be competent to undertake a general mentoring role. Anotherconsidered that ‘subject-specific’ requirements comprised the ability to advise oncourse organisation matters such as assessment arrangements. Others appeared toaccept that there are practices that are inherent to particular disciplines, that there arefundamental differences in subjects that required their pedagogy to be fundamentallydifferent.

Hankey suggests some common sense reasons why a mentor should be a subjectspecialist in the same subject as the trainee teacher:

Knowing how to pitch the subject at the appropriate level for different groups of learners,and having ready questions, examples and anecdotes, are all aspects of professional prac-tice that novice teachers find particularly problematic and this is precisely where a goodmentor can provide advice and resources. (Hankey 2004, 394)

Such ideas touch superficially on fundamental epistemological questions about the FEcurriculum. If we adopt a social constructivist view of subjects then essentially atrainee is being inducted into a particular social group, a community of practice, andinto the customs and practices of that group. The mentor’s task is one of enabling atrainee to adopt a new identity as a particular kind of teacher. However, this is acontested area and there are competing views of what it means to become identified

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with different subjects (Young 2008). That a ‘subject’ is a problematic concept – tosay nothing of any associated pedagogy – appears to be unrecognised in most of theliterature on mentoring and yet there is strong expectation, particularly in Ofstedreports, that a key task for mentors should be the provision of guidance on subject-specific teaching.

Thirdly, there is mentoring which supports someone becoming a member of theprofession, in developing the knowledge, skills and values appropriate for a teacher inthe learning and skills sector. Underpinning the debate about mentoring is a tension tobe found in any training programme between, on the one hand, the formative, devel-opmental purposes and, on the other, the summative, judgemental requirementsneeded for quality assurance, inspection and accountability.

During a teacher training course, a trainee’s needs are essentially formative. Thetrainee may benefit from the support of someone who can be relied on to give helpfulinformation and advice through the transitions needed to become a teacher. Such tran-sitions are inevitably focused upon the trainee’s personal and professional develop-ment within a particular team or community of practice. If the trainee’s needs andconcerns are to be addressed, then it is the trainee who needs to lead the process andset the agenda. If the relationship is to succeed in addressing that agenda, there needsto be trust and the process may need on occasions to be confidential.

At the end of a course, the concluding process is summative. An assessor mustarrive at a final judgement to decide whether an individual trainee has achieved theassessment standards necessary to gain the qualification. That decision is necessarilypublic. It provides a public affirmation that the student is capable of professionalpractice at a satisfactory level. The process needs to be led by the assessor.

These tensions find expression in the differences between Mentoring towardsexcellence (AoC and FENTO 2001) and Equipping our teachers for the future (DfES2004). The former was derived from a study of practices in colleges and advocated adevelopmental approach to mentoring; the latter frames Ofsted inspections and isessentially a judgemental model (Table 1 summarises these tensions).

One of the benefits of developmental and/or informal mentoring is that it allowspeople to develop mentor relationships in ways that are best suited to their needs andpersonal circumstances (Colley 2003; Lawy and Tedder 2009a, 2009b). However, asColley found, where there is a focus on ‘hard’ outcomes (such as employability orprogression into a narrow range of training) it can undermine the benefits of ‘soft’outcomes: greater confidence, improved health, raised aspirations. There is surely astrong parallel in these findings with the professional development of teachers in FE

Table 1. A comparison of models of mentoring.

A developmental model (Exemplified in Mentoring towards excellence)

A judgemental model (Exemplified in Equipping our teachers for the future)

Best undertaken in confidence Necessarily publicFormative purpose – focussed on personal

and professional developmentSummative purpose – focussed on judgement

of performanceSupportive through transitions Subject-centredProfession-centred Concerned with standardsSuitable for all Mainly for traineesEmphasis on networks Emphasis on individualsLed by mentee Led by mentor

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colleges where ‘hard’ outcomes reflect those that are summative and judgementalwhile ‘softer’ outcomes are formative and developmental. Cullimore and Simmons(2008) similarly observe problems from the growth of the ‘rationalist, cognitivistversion of mentoring’ through government requirements for action planning, targetsetting and grading for summative judgements.

Conclusions

We conclude that uncertainty about mentoring can be attributed at least in part to threeareas of complexity: firstly, there are different kinds of transition that mentoringsystems try to address; secondly, there are contrasting models of mentoring in opera-tion and these models are mediated by the personal experiences and the learningcultures of different colleges; thirdly, there is a wide age range and great diversity ofsubject and industrial experience among FE teacher trainees (certainly more variedand complex than trainees in school teacher training) and this means that trainees havevaried needs and expectations. If mentoring systems are to be effective then they needto be flexible and sophisticated in responding to such complexities.

A small scale study like ours can help clarify issues and enhance understanding ofsuch complexities. It is important to understand the perceptions, understandings andreflections of people who are affected by changing policies and are expected to adapttheir practices, often, as we have seen, in ways that are unclear because meanings arecontested. Notwithstanding this problem, we were able to identify the importance ofgood communication within trusting relationships in all cases. Furthermore, we havefound that systems need to be flexible enough to allow for a range of possible contactsto enable discussion and support; in a sense, the process of mentoring is more impor-tant for the support of a trainee than the role or identity of any specific mentor.

We have seen that the government emphasises an approach to mentoring that istarget-driven and judgemental, founded upon a set of assumptions about excellence.We have seen that many of those assumptions are open to question. We do not denythe need for assessment in teacher training programmes, nor the desirability of stan-dards as a framework for professional formation. What we would question is the formthat this has taken: refashioning the idea of mentorship from a developmental into ajudgemental function diminishes its transformative potential. The danger is thattrainee teachers may lose opportunities for open and frank discussion with theirmentors, whether they are formal or informal, in the course of professional formationand lose the essential analytic criticality that is central to the process of teachertraining or, as we prefer to call it, teacher education.

Notes1. Further education colleges represent the largest and most substantial component of the

further education (FE) sector in the UK. In different contexts the FE sector is known as the‘learning and skills sector’ or the ‘lifelong learning sector’ that embraces adult and commu-nity learning (ACL), work-based learning (WBL), and the voluntary sector. Teachers whoundertake courses leading to teaching qualifications may include tutors and trainers inprisons, hospitals, the armed forces and other public services.

2. As a ‘sector skills council’, Lifelong Learning UK (LLUK) is responsible for setting thestandards. Responsibility for quality assurance has been delegated to another body,Standards Verification UK (SVUK).

3. The 11 Centres for Excellence in Teacher Training (CETTs) were established by theQuality Improvement Agency (QIA) as a means for targeting resources and funding into

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the Learning and Skills sector. The funding for our study came from the CETT for theSouth West of England known as Switch. The QIA has been replaced by the Learning andSkills Improvement Service (LSIS).

4. The creation of ‘advanced teachers’ or ‘advanced practitioners’ formed part of a strategyto enable pay progression and seniority of status for experienced FE teachers who wishedto keep their work classroom-based rather than seek promotion into management. We haveused the term ‘advanced teacher’ to embrace a role called variously ‘advanced practitioner’or ‘advanced teacher’ in different colleges.

5. 7407 refers to City & Guilds 7407, one of the many numerical designations that thisawarding body has given to its teaching qualifications. Probably the best known andmost durable qualification was C&G 730, the Further and Adult Education Teachers’Certificate.

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