ABSTRACT
Research findings indicate that many aspects of primary school culture, while often producing the tensions discussed below, are of great importance to the development of effective mentoring. It is not enough to provide a collaborative ethos; support and leadership from the management of the school, skilled, reflective mentoring and precise useful feedback to students are all necessary ingredients. Willing class teachers who are able to negotiate appropriate contexts for student learning have a central role. This chapter provides details on several schools for the reader to have some sense of the primary school worlds involved in the project and of the contrasting contexts. The primary school teachers in the research team were well-experienced in mentoring from the outset. They had worked with student teachers over several years and each had had a role in one or other of the various MMU pilot schemes.
