ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the various facets of teacher mentoring and asserts that mentoring is pivotal to teacher retention, development and the development of pedagogy. The late Professor Carey Philpott, passionate about teacher learning, carefully scrutinised aspects of evidence-based teaching following the publication of the Carter Review (2015) and its call for teachers to adopt such in education. Philpott scrutinised that along with the medical model and found aspects that failed to align with educational contexts. Frequently, he discovered that teacher learning took the form of teachers in professional learning communities adopting policies without question and instead focusing on how efficiently the policies were adhered to while issues around the content itself were ignored.
In spite of the potential student gains and increased teacher satisfaction that mentoring brings about, there is currently no government mentoring policy anywhere in the UK. A number of pivotal agencies across the globe have produced exemplary guidelines and systems; as such, this chapter advocates strongly for the implementation of mentoring policies in the UK.
