Mentoring Matters – Summer 2025
10 July 2025
Welcome to Mentoring Matters, Arthur Terry TSH’s newsletter dedicated to colleagues across the city who mentor and coach trainee and early career teachers. This term’s issue focuses on the wide and varied impact of mentoring.
As the Teaching School Hub for North Birmingham, we are passionate about the importance of mentoring and coaching. We want to offer enhancements and support to mentors across the city because your work is so crucial to your school and the profession at large. We will aim to keep Mentoring Matters to a 5 minute read.
Jump Links
Resources for mentors:
Created for our ITT mentors, we would like to share our 5 step guide to lesson feedback. It is based on the model for instructional coaching developed by Paul Bambrick-Santoyo in Get Better Faster.
We have also developed a comprehensive guide to deliberate practice for mentors to use. This guide includes steps to success and some concrete examples of activities mentors can use to deliver effective deliberate practice for the ECTs and trainees.
Mentors Are Change Makers
In this term’s issue, we’re expanding on some musings shared by Joe, our Deputy Director, in a recent social media post.
At this time of year, many of our programmes are drawing to their conclusions and midpoint pauses for the summer break. In the sessions we deliver around this time in the calendar, there is always an increasingly synoptic, reflective feel to discussions. Aside from the feeling of success (and perhaps relief) that colleagues experience, there are interesting themes that emerge.
Many of those themes are what we might expect:
- Mentoring increases colleagues’ knowledge of and confidence with the evidence base around effective teaching. This is part of the intent behind the ‘golden thread’ reforms but our experience suggests these reforms are actually changing the way teachers think and behave.
- Mentors are increasingly confident with instructional coaching approaches and deliberate practice. We know there is a wealth of evidence behind these increasingly commonplace approaches but mentors who may have been skeptical in the past are using these techniques and seeing and feeling the accelerated improvements they can bring about.
- Many mentors, emboldened by their success in that role, are now starting their own journeys of leadership development – either through promotion, additional CPD through NPQs or a combination of the two.
- Although evidence suggests it should, many mentors have been surprised by the level of impact that mentoring and mentor training have had on their classroom practice.
In our final sessions with ECF and ITT mentors, we try to emphasise these benefits but we also impress upon our mentors and coaches that they are invaluable and essential to school improvement and ensuring that all students experience great teaching.
With how busy school life is, it’s easy to lose sight of these benefits and of the unseen hours of hard work and good will that it takes to mentor effectively.
Mentors are at the front line of change in schools. Thank you for all the work you do.
Mentoring Changes Perception
By its very nature, mentoring is a selfless endeavour, and can often feel like an act of service. What was fascinating to hear, from quite a high proportion of our mentors, was the change in the way they were perceived by their peers and senior leaders in their schools.
Several colleagues spoke to us about this change, explaining that:
- Peers within their department had started to view them differently, acknowledging their expertise and pedagogical content knowledge openly. This increased the mentor’s standing in the department and boosted their confidence.
- By demonstrating their expertise through mentoring, colleagues shared that they were increasingly seen as experts who ‘know what good looks like’ – a badge of honour that makes a colleague immensely valuable to their team and their school.
- Mentors are able to engender change. Their impact extends beyond their own classroom and by supporting another professional to get better, they are increasingly respected by their peers.
- Mentors have found that they are the go-to person for pedagogy support and advice.
These are just a sample of the amazing experiences and development our mentors have experienced. We hope that these effects will be felt for years to come and that our ever-growing mentor workforce continues to have such widespread impact and feel the benefits for their own practice and confidence.
Mentors are some of the most important colleagues in schools. So much of your work goes unseen and relies on your good will and desire to support and improve the quality of education our students receive.
Thank you for all your hard work, we could not do it without you.
Share your stories
This newsletter is not just about sharing our feedback and findings with you. We are always excited to gather feedback and stories from our mentors. If you have a success story or a case study related to mentoring and coaching on either the ECT or ITT programmes, we want to hear from you. Get in touch to set up a time for a conversation: jgavin@atlp.org.uk
Thank you for reading Mentoring Matters, and don’t hesitate to get in touch if you need support, or if you have suggestions for how we can continue to improve the experience or support package for mentors.
Mentoring matters and your work makes a difference, not only to the teachers you support, but to the life chances and educational experiences of thousands of children. We could not do it without you.
