ABSTRACT

The mentor should use appropriate challenges to encourage the trainee to reflect on their practice. The training of teachers drives the quality of the education service, and the mentor is at the heart of that training. While other training components may perhaps vary according to the training scheme, the centrality of the mentor is a constant. This centrality was underlined in 2016 by the creation of a set of United Kingdom National Standards for Mentoring, a task initiated by the secretary of state for education. The mentor will embrace behaviour management because it is work that clearly belongs to the school. Successful mentoring depends absolutely on the notion of partnership, and this means that the mentor has to understand, shape and support the full range of training components. These components may exist, in part, outside the school, in a school-centred initial teacher training (SCITT) centre or a university, as well as existing in different contexts within the school.