Meeting the potential for mentoring in Initial Teacher Education: mentors’ perspectives from the Lifelong Learning Sector

The Lifelong Learning Sector’s very diversity has produced a variety of mentoring practice, contested notions of subject pedagogy, and a continuum of mentoring from the ‘jobsworth’ to the master mentor. This article reports on two linked action research projects which investigate the context and challenges of mentoring in the Lifelong Learning Sector (LLS) following a raft of reforms to Initial Teacher Training (ITT) (DfES, 2002; DfES, 2004; Ofsted, 2003). In the research, mentors were asked to reflect on their experiences, interpretations of and training for their role and how they support subject pedagogy. The conclusion suggests that the government’s and regulatory bodies’ conflation of subject knowledge with subject pedagogy adds to the lack of coherent policy towards mentoring teacher trainees in the LLS; that mentor training should be re-focused; and that mentoring should be as well funded and supported in the LLS as it is in the schools sector