Is mentoring of newly qualified teachers (NQTs) in Wales supportive of the development of teacher professionalism or simply adding to NQTs’ ‘to-do lists’?

This small-scale, qualitative, longitudinal study explored NQTs’ experiences of being mentored by following nine individuals throughout their first year of teaching to understand the nature of the mentoring support that they received. Undertaken against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, findings indicated that the mentoring approaches experienced by NQTs were largely instrumental. These were dominated by administrative tasks to meet external quality-assurance requirements through the documenting and recording of experiences. Findings illuminated that mentoring experiences were onerous and simply added to NQTs’ ‘to-do lists’, because they were focused almost exclusively on technically meeting the standards and instrumentally documenting these. This was consistently privileged and prioritised, leaving little time and space to engage in essential professional learning through critical collaborative conversations that problematised and interrogated practice in order to develop expertise. Importantly, these impoverished approaches to mentoring NQTs were not different to the instrumental practices identified prior to the pandemic (Waters, 2020). This article is therefore relevant because if sustained, these practices would be highly concerning and have enduring implications for the profession.