Introduction to Mentoring

Welcome to Mentor Development at LJMU. We have a long-standing reputation for excellence in teacher education, consistently delivering high-quality provision through strong partnership working.

LJMU offers innovative approaches to Initial Teacher Education (ITE), collaborating with primary, secondary, and other education providers across the North-West of England and beyond. In our most recent inspection (June 2023), Ofsted graded both Primary and Secondary ITE provision at LJMU as 'Good'. A particular strength noted by Ofsted is our ambitious ITE curriculum, underpinned by appropriate and pertinent research, providing student teachers with the breadth and depth of knowledge they need to succeed.

At LJMU we are committed through our partnerships with schools, to ensure that our student teachers develop strong subject knowledge, and the professional skills needed to succeed as teachers. LJMU and its partner schools are dedicated to developing socially engaged teachers who are well-prepared to make a positive difference to the life chances of pupils across the Liverpool City Region and beyond.

Mentor Development

The Department for Education states that all mentors (General Mentors) should have access to 'high quality training' to enable them to provide 'high quality mentoring' to student teachers. At LJMU we are committed to supporting our mentors with their workload and have considered this fully when developing our mentoring plans. We recognise that school General Mentors (GMs) are fundamental to the quality of the student teachers' learning experiences and to the success of individual student teachers and our ITE programmes.

Mentoring will evolve, depending on the phase of training and a student teacher's individual needs, but typically the role develops from one of supervision in Phase 1, to mentoring in Phase 2 and coaching and co-enquiry in Phase 3. To facilitate the mentoring role there are several key mentoring processes student teachers need to go through to demonstrate they have the teaching skills for their chosen profession. We value the support of our school-based mentors who play a crucial role in supporting the development of student knowledge and understanding, providing practical experience to underpin their theoretical learning so they have the skills required for the teaching profession.

At LJMU, our mentoring in facilitated through our partnership and placement platform, Abyasa. All our mentors already use this platform to complete formative assessment reviews throughout the training year. At LJMU, we want the transition to a mentoring platform to be as streamlined as possible for our mentors and thus we use one platform (Abyasa) to communicate with all our schools and mentors.

Mentor Development

When mentors are allocated a student teacher, they will be able to update Abyasa with any prior relevant mentoring with evidence. We have aligned our mentoring through the Liverpool and Greater Merseyside ITT Group to enable our partner schools to have previous mentor development acknowledged. Mentoring evidence is currently aligned with the following institutions:

• Associated Merseyside Partnership SCITT (Lydiate Learning Trust)
• Merseyside Boroughs ITE Partnership
• Generate Teaching Hub
• Rainbow Teaching School Hub
• Inspire Learning Teaching School Hub
• Liverpool Hope University
• Edge Hill University
• University of Chester

If a General Mentor has undertaken prior mentor training with one of these institutions, then they need to identify the LJMU session it aligns to and upload the evidence of completion. This will be reviewed individually.