Teacher trainee mentor development at the University of Staffordshire

The University of Staffordshire has been training teachers for over 20 years. The university offers a BA (Hons) Primary Education with Qualified Teacher Status and, though its Institute of Education, a suite of postgraduate teaching courses. It also runs a Level 6 Teacher Apprenticeship and will pilot the teacher degree apprenticeship in mathematics from September 2025.

Like all Initial Teacher Education/Initial Teacher Training (ITT) providers, the university is required to establish a professional network of well-trained and expert mentors to meet the 2024 mentoring requirements.

Teacher trainee mentor development is a type of training where a more experienced teacher, provides support and guidance to a less experienced teacher to help them improve their teaching and advance their career.

Specifically, school-based mentors must complete 20 hours of initial training with an accredited ITT provider, plus six hours of annual refresher training, to enable them to offer high-quality support on school training placements.

Lead mentors must complete 30 hours of initial training, plus 12 hours of annual refresher training. The training will help mentors understand their role, the skills they need, and the ITT core content framework (soon to be ITTECF framework from September 2025).

University of Staffordshire Senior Lecturer Kate Dale, who leads the PGCE Secondary programme as well as teaching across all PGCE Secondary courses, outlines how the university is approaching mentor development with support from the National Association of School-Based Teacher Trainers (NASBTT).

Strength in collaboration: regionally, and sector wide

Following a period of reflection, and consultation with local and regional stakeholders around how best to tackle the new mentoring requirements, the university enrolled on NASBTT’s Mentor Development Modules (MDMs) which offer a flexible suite of training resources that can be embedded within existing elements of mentor training.

“We’ve always been part of UCET,” Kate said, “but a couple of years ago also joined NASBTT to sign up to their resources and development sessions. When mentor development and training became part of my role, I began a discussion with the West Midlands Partnership (comprising HEIs and SCITTs) to think through how we deal with mentor training and development, and given the massive changes we came to the conclusion that we needed to collaborate on what that looked like. We agreed to deliver training through NASBTT, meaning that mentors are portable from one provider to another. In the local region, we are also supporting mentor workload and collaboration through the Stoke and Staffordshire Teacher Education Collective so transferability is important.”

The MDMs are designed to support ITT providers in meeting the training time requirements, the demands for a fully resourced mentor curriculum that aligns with the trainee curriculum equipping mentors with an understanding of the curriculum content trainees will cover, and an approach to mentoring based on the best available evidence.

In the 2023-24 academic year, Kate oversaw the roll-out of six modules.

Kate said: “The MDMs we introduced to 15 lead mentors are: Deliberate practice; Difficult conversations; Reflective practice; Mentoring or coaching; Observing your mentee; and Understanding the CCF. Thinking about implementing instructional coaching also really helped emphasise the expectations of the lead mentor and what they now want to model with general mentors. The Difficult conversations module is another really focused model that will have a big impact on general mentors.”

A comprehensive toolkit for general mentors

Having completed the lead mentor training, the same six modules will now be introduced to up to 150 general mentors for September 2024.

“We are really excited about the potential. This is about us providing the tools, and a toolkit, for what general mentors need to do,” Kate said. “Lead mentors will also use these to support them to do that, and while this is a great starting point learning is not finished at the end of the module.

Importantly, [the modules] cut workload. We need more mentoring capacity in schools, and this agenda brings an opportunity for professional development that will help teachers to move onwards and upwards in their career.”

Case study developed in September 2024