The Management of Mentoring

Policy Issues

Derek Glover, George Mardle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134984480
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

As initial teacher education moves increasingly to the school, mentoring is becoming an ever more crucial part of the training process. This book examines the policy issues surrounding mentoring, at both the national and school levels, drawing on research and case studies.

Chapter 1
The Policy Context

George Mardle

The aim of this chapter is to outline the broad policy in which the development of the mentoring framework in teacher education has taken place, and to set our investigation within that context. It will seek to address the macro social, economic and political influences that have promoted the creative turbulence for both higher education institutions and schools in this area. Also addressed will be the policy frameworks within which schools themselves are approaching the questions of mentoring. It will argue that the often crude and narrow assumptions made by government, and which are being challenged by current practice, may themselves provide the basis for future developments in teacher education. They could, if grasped appropriately, promote a model of professionalism that could lead to greater optimism in the development of teacher education.

The Political Agenda

Clearly, given the limits of the field of investigation within this book, we cannot deal with all of the complex historical roots that might have influenced the education system in general and more specifically teacher education. Nevertheless, it would also be foolish to deny that many of the current themes in the area are not new and reflect contradictions and dilemmas that have been around in the area since the 1870s. As Bolton (1994) argues: ‘The general drift of government policy is clear: namely to break up the more or less monolithic pattern of ITT and to decouple it from higher education.’ Suffice it to say that this movement of teacher education to the top of the political agenda could be the final part of a plan to implement Tory party thinking on education, which has been a prominent theme in the political arena since the general election of 1979.

Yet to assume that the system has merely been reactive to these circumstances would be to ignore the fact that teacher educators have also been proactive in continually addressing the issues and dilemmas that they have been presented with by government policy. Attempts to recognize good practice and to promote the professional development of reflexive practitioners have not been ignored. Difficulties have arisen because of the lack of dialogue and consultation that seems to have been the hallmark of the government approach in most of its policy formulations, particularly in education.

It will be my concern to argue that while we cannot ignore the dominance of a particular ideological agenda in the changes of the past few years, we nevertheless have a clear duty to future generations to make sure that we promote a highly committed and professional workforce through the development of a thoroughly coherent model of teacher education. This should be one that addresses both the context of what the education and training should be about and an understanding of the balance concerning where it should take place.

It might well be argued, as numerous commentators do (see Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1981), that the starting point for the creative turmoil that has affected the education system for the past 20 years was the famous Ruskin College speech by Jim Callaghan in 1976, which addressed what he saw as the failings of the then current education system. The agenda that he set, particularly in relation to the centralization and control of the system, was immediately taken up by an incoming Tory government led by Margaret Thatcher, who set about systematically dismantling the careful partnerships of the previous 35 years in a crusade of ideological fervour to win back the ‘school system’ to traditional values. Backed up by thinkers who wished to finally dispense with ‘socialism’ in all its forms, particularly in relation to education, it produced a heady cocktail of reform. Many of the proponents could trace their intellectual origins back to the Black Papers in Education (Cox and Boyson, 1970; Cox and Dyson, 1977). They saw as their essential remit the necessity to challenge the progressive hegemony that had been at the forefront of educational thinking, in their opinion, since the 1960s. Standards were too low, old values were being eroded and authority was being challenged. The imagery of traditional classrooms with gentlemen scholars at the front abounded, and was part of the implicit vision throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s in teacher education reform.

However, in challenging the perceived dominance of what Kogan (1978) calls ‘insider groups’, the politicians in power realized that their agenda for change could not be achieved instantaneously. Not only did England and Wales have one of the most devolved systems of education in the world, but any form of structural change is notoriously difficult to undertake, as McPherson and Raab (1988) argue: ‘To focus on changes which formal policies seek is to disregard the fundamental inertia to which all formal policy changes are marginal.’

The policy makers therefore needed to adopt a number of strategies that would allow the new radical agenda to take root. The first was to promote and sustain some kind of moral outrage at the way standards had fallen. Following in the footsteps of the Black Paper rhetoric, the key ‘folk devil’ to attack was the prevalence of so-called progressive teaching methods. This was linked to a concern about the standards of education achieved in our schools in relation to our international rivals. Meeting these criticisms would essentially destroy the mythology of the comprehensive ideal and set a commonsense approach to the issues of change, particularly in the area of teacher education (Moore, 1994). An ideological void was filled quickly by TINA (There Is No Alternative) arguments such as a ‘return to family values’ (Margaret Thatcher) and the campaign for ‘back to basics’ (John Major). The second move was to gradually gain control of the system in order to promote and sustain these particular ideologies. The mechanism used to achieve this was the gradual promotion of the double aims of centralization and marketization. In essence, the state would, through a process of centralization, take control of what was taught in the institutions. This would ensure that the Tory agenda on standards would be achieved. The use of the market in the running of the system would then ensure that this process was achieved in the most efficient and economical way. It would essentially also placate the pressure groups from the two wings of the Tory party, ie, the One Nation Tories and the New Right Liberal Economics wing.

The other important element in the achievement of this change was inherent in the administration of the system. As the politicians saw it, all was not well in relation to state control. Essentially, too many years of corporatist involvement had left the power in the hands of the professionals. However, it was not possible to dismantle this perceived elite all at once. The three central areas of concern were, first, the running of schools where many were under the potentially ‘bad’ influence of left-wing local authorities; second, the nature of the curriculum, which was seen as diverse and lacking relevance, and also under the possibly ‘dangerous’ influence of progressive teachers who questioned societal norms; and third, and for our purposes the most important, the control of teacher education itself and the development of future generations of teachers were seen as fundamental to the achievement of an improved education service.

A detailed catalogue of legislation in the 1980s would suggest that basic priorities were always linked around the control of the first two concerns, with the promotion of local management of schools and the gradual erosion of the role of local authorities, coupled with the development of the National Curriculum. There were, however, ominous signs that teacher education was also to be an area for review, with some interesting preliminary skirmishes as evidenced in the Teacher Quality Paper (DfE, 1983), Circular 3/84 (DfE, 1984), and the development of the Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (CATE). Nevertheless, it was always on the agenda that teacher education would at some stage become a focus of attention for ministers eager to make their mark or to show purity of commitment with the educational policy gurus from the various right-wing think tanks.

From the early 1990s the main target became the area of teacher education, the alleged last bastion of progressivism and woolly liberal thinking in education. Cleverly, the way in which the debate was orchestrated shows teacher educators as a minority whose only interest is to challenge the common sense orthodoxy (Moore, 1994) which is at the heart of Tory thinking. In summary, the view is that if we can all see the way the education system fails, then we can all see how it is perpetuated if new teachers learn the wrong things; hence we can all see that the best solution to the problem would be to take the education and training of teachers away from the people who promote this theoretical and, to some, dangerous, heresy.

This attack on the teacher educators is therefore the last element in the achievement of an overall educational policy. The view is that if the monopoly of teacher educators can be broken and their opportunity for ideological input minimized, there will be a unified system where teachers know what to teach, through the National Curriculum; how to teach it effectively, through on-the-job training, and in the most efficient manner, through the local management of schools. Neither the simplicity of this argument nor the vitriol with which some politicians describe the role of teacher educators should be underestimated. In a lecture to the Conservative Political Centre in 1993, the then Secretary of State for Education, John Patten, explained: ‘…we are ensuring that teacher training is precisely that, training – undertaken as much as possible in the school – and not wasted studying dated and irrelevant texts on theory’. More recently, in a debate on the 1994 Education Bill (which incidentally set up the Teacher Training Agency), Rhodes Boyson was heard to state: ‘I sometimes think that training for teachers…is a restrictive lower-middle-class practice…people should not be brought in from universities…’.

Yet as many other writers have indicated, the debate which is at the heart of these statements is not new. There has and always will be a debate about the relationship, as in any other practical profession, between theory and practice. What is at issue is the extreme position taken by government and an inability to see that the logical extension of such action might lead to the very point where some of the demands for professional competence cannot be met because their rationale is not understood by classroom practitioners.

Contemporary Teacher Education

It is helpful at this stage to remind ourselves of the position of teacher education in the latter part of the 20th century. In essence, we have reached a stage where all teachers have a clear professional education and training experience before they are able to practise. While no one would be complacent about the universal achievement of the highest standards in both of these elements, they are nevertheless tried and tested through two models. The first is the professional training model (PGCE). Here the emphasis is on the acceptance of a knowledge base, through an appropriate subject-based degree, with the general input of educational technique and theory as a bolt-on process. The second is that of a concurrent professional training. Here the emphasis is on the development of educational practice and theory alongside that of the necessary subject specialisms. Alternatives have been suggested (sandwich courses, two-year PGCE) but in the world of scarce resources, these two models remain clearly the most viable.

While there has been no clear empirical evidence that either method of training was inadequate and, indeed, reports by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate were generally favourable, the populist stance of the government on teacher quality had to be addressed. Bolton (1994) summarized the situation thus: ‘… the teaching profession generally, and primary teachers in particular, had been seduced away from sound traditional teaching methods into progressive, soft-centred relativism by academic teacher trainers and various assorted gurus’.

The answer to this criticism from external commentators was to suggest reversion to a much older and more traditional model which, though essentially now disregarded by the professionals, provided the politicians with just the right populist format. What in essence was being suggested was the development, albeit in various guises, of the apprenticeship model. Notable for its simplicity, the basis of this is to provide training for teachers by placing them alongside experts, taking in what is regarded as common sense knowledge of what everyone knows about teaching. It is as if by osmosis students learn by observation and then go into the classroom to repeat what has been seen. This provides implicit socialization into the basic mechanisms of teaching by providing clear and uninterrupted experience of all that is best in practice, without any real interference from discussion based on reflection on context or practice, or from irrelevant theory.

This priority of placing practice at the forefront of the agenda was further supported by the heavy emphasis from the mid-1980s, spurred on by the development of National Vocational Qualifications, on the notion of a system of teaching competences. By moving to an output model rather than a process one, it is clear that the nature of inputs becomes secondary to the real business at hand, which is to provide evidence of accomplishment in the practical situation. However this may be achieved, or whatever inputs are necessary to promote it, as long as it is recorded, we have a clear profile of a potentially skilled technician. Such arguments therefore represent a very succinct and fundamental change in the external understanding of what teaching is about. Is it on the one hand a basically technical accomplishment or, on the other, a reflective and developing professional practice? To put it crudely, are teachers technicians or professionals?

More importantly for a government committed to a moral crusade to reassert the fundamental cultural values of our society, such a model also shifts emphasis onto the moral calibre of the teachers themselves. If teacher educators are to have no real input into the process, then the influence of those who it is assumed are opposed to the revisionist policies of the government is finally diminished. Standards, behaviour and morality come to the fore and, in effect, as Bolton (1994) argues: ‘…the debate about teacher training has become a debate about fundamental values implicit in, and transmitted by, teachers and schools’.

These arguments about the nature of teacher education are not new, neither is the argument which seems to be at the heart of the discussion, namely the relationship between theory and practice. Clearly any form of education and training for teachers will have a value structure surrounding it, either explicitly or implicitly. Common sense is also a value structure. Furthermore, as indicated previously, there have always been discrepancies between the theory and practice of teacher education (Mardle and Walker, 1980). Centrally, the issue is how best to integrate the three components of prior socialization, theoretical input and on-the-job training to promote the best possible professional development which allows values to be addressed in their context, and not with some implicit ideological prescription.

We might also ask why the emphasis on this prescriptive apprenticeship model has so readily come to the fore. Importantly, the choice of models is not based on simple expediency. If we refer back to the two key elements identified earlier we know that marketization and centralization provide clear messages regarding the government’s view of how the education service should develop. There are, therefore, two other important strands of argument which are relevant. First, major changes in the management of schools have led to a clearly managerialist approach to their internal organization. A consequence of this process is to indicate, by a series of control mechanisms, the de-skilling of the teaching profession. So we have a link between a move to change the nature of the teaching activity itself and a clear promotion of an implicit technician model of training. To have provided a professional development model is something which would have been seen as anathema to the underlying values promoted by the government. Second, one of the most important driving forces for change in the public sector has been in the economic sphere. Value for money arguments have always shown the education and training process for teachers to be relatively expensive. The government, by transferring the process away from higher education towards the school system, has been able to meet two aims. In essence it is taking the control of teacher education away from the dominance of the liberal intelligentsia while at the same time promoting developments in institutions basically starved of finance. As with most new innovations in the public sector, there is only recycling of old cash and not development of new.

It might well be argued that mentoring was a clear move by HEIs to counter many of the simplified and philistine approaches which had been trailed by right-wing think tanks throughout the 1980s. It would be wrong, however, to assume that the move was merely a knee-jerk reaction. The idea that there is a major and fundamentally flawed disjuncture between theory and practice in teacher education is yet again part of a useful myth exuded by politicians with a particular agenda to push. The relationship between theory and practice has always promoted a healthy and lively debate. There has been an involvement of schools and teachers in the process of teacher training since the Elizabethan grammar schools. However, what has often happened since 1944 is that in many ways schools were part of the sub-text, a necessary place to go to undertake the practical element, with teachers, but not as the key aspect of the training process. Perhaps that itself led to clear antagonism at times between the higher education input, the school input and the student in training. The old adage of students being told to ignore the ‘airy fairy theory’ they had learnt in college and concentrate on the real world when they enter teaching practice, is part of the mythology of teacher training courses. Repeatedly, research had traditionally indicated that: ‘…colleges and university departments deal in theoretical ideals and liberal philosophies which are impractical and irrelevant to the job of teaching. This is facilitated by the “distance” between training institutions and schools’ (Mardle and Walker, 1980).

Notwithstanding the general criticism of that general assertion, it has continually provided ammu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. The Policy Context
• 2. The Organizational Framework
• 3. Case Studies
• 4. The Mentor
• 5. The Professional Mentor
• 6. Partnership
• 7. The Departmental Perspective
• 8. Interaction and Impact
• 9. The Consequences
• Appendix: The Research Methodology
• Index