GEMMA MOLYNEUX, CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT ADVISER, STOCKTON SCITT, UK
Introduction
Last year, Schools Week reported that the drop-out rate on initial teacher trainingAbbreviated to ITT, the period of academic study and time in school leading to Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) (ITTInitial teacher training - the period of academic study and time in school leading to Qualified Teacher Status (QTS)) courses had doubled since 2019 (Whittaker, 2024). Although this year’s figures indicate that the overall percentage has remained steady at seven per cent, the percentage of trainees who do not achieve QTS is notably higher in the North East of England, at 10 per cent (DfEDepartment for Education - a ministerial department responsible for children’s services and education in England, 2024). These figures underline the need to understand not only why trainees leave but also what helps them to adapt, persist and succeed.
Trainee teachers learn within challenging social environments. The Teacher Wellbeing Index (Education Support, 2024) reveals that 78 per cent of teachers report being stressed, with half of all school staff perceiving their workplace culture as detrimental to their mental health and wellbeing. While policy encourages ITT providers to include training on reducing and managing workload to support resilience (Carter, 2015; DfE, 2018), there is a need to consider ways in which resilience is influenced by the culture and relationships that trainees experience, as well as their individual coping strategies.
Reforms in ITT have recognised the importance of high-quality mentoring for beginning teachers. This has involved placing more emphasis on mentor training and extending the mentoring offer from one year to two years for early career teachers (ECTs). Indeed, mentors are known to have significant positive and negative effects on the wellbeing of beginning teachers (Kutsyuruba et al., 2019). However, ensuring that positive outcomes are not left to chance requires an understanding of how mentoring fosters resilience, so that the mentor–trainee relationship can be intentionally harnessed to support trainees’ success.
Aims
This study aimed to develop an understanding of the contextual influence of mentoring on trainee teachers’ experiences of resilience.
Supportive relationships are known to enhance teachers’ perceived competence, motivation and self-concept (Skaalvik and Skaalvik, 2016), pointing to mentoring as a potential source of resilience. However, beyond supporting skill development, the nature of the mentor–trainee relationship and the broader social context can make a significant difference. Based on a large-scale, longitudinal study of teacher resilience at all career stages, supportive, trust-based relationships with colleagues were key to helping teachers to stay committed and cope with challenges, fostering a shared sense of purpose and collective capacity (Gu and Day, 2013). Although existing studies captured trainee teachers within wider samples, this study aims to examine this group in detail to explore their unique experiences.
Methodology
This study adopted a hermeneutical phenomenological approach, which involves the interpretation and description of the lived experiences of trainee teachers. By illuminating the ways in which trainee teachers make sense of their experiences, this research can identify useful approaches to mentoring that can foster resilience in trainee teachers. In this respect, knowledge is dynamic and contextual, inviting the reader to connect findings to their own context rather than be directed to specific, generalised actions (Dibley et al., 2020).
Methods
Ethical approval for the study was granted by St Mary’s University, Twickenham, before the commencement of data gathering. To capture the complexity of human experience, a small sample of four recently qualified teachers were interviewed using a semi-structured approach. This flexibility allowed participants to reveal what was meaningful for them. Purposive sampling was used to recruit participants who completed school-based initial teacher training, which is structured to place trainees in schools earlier in the academic year. Focusing on this route provided a consistent context central to exploring mentoring relationships. The data was analysed using Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle to guide analysis (Dibley et al., 2020). Being ethically conscious of my role in the iterative process of interpretation, I kept a researcher journal throughout and systematically tracked how it informed my decisions in a spreadsheet to maintain focus on the participants’ experience. The process included the phenomenological approach of taking time to consider what the data revealed so that I could uncover themes and connections that weren’t initially obvious. This process took around five months of going back and forth between participant data and interpretations, culminating in interpretative summaries of participants’ experiences.
Findings
This study found that the impact of mentoring on trainee teacher resilience centred around whether mentors helped to create space for trainee teachers to develop a professional identity that was congruent with their existing identity and personal history. This change impacted both who they are more generally and their developing professional identity. Concurrently, when mentoring relationships encouraged trainees to acquiesce too much of their identities in the process of becoming a teacher, this imbalance negatively impacted their resilience. Three themes emerged that can support ITT providers, schools and mentors to make practical use of the data.
Power
I didn’t feel like I could say that because I’m a trainee… who am I? You know?
Participant 1
Mentors who encouraged trainees to have agency over their development fostered resilience in their trainees by enabling the development of an authentic teacher identity. Overly directive and inflexible mentoring approaches that encouraged trainees to self-suppress, rather than reflect openly, hindered resilience. As Wenger observes:
If you limit expressibility and you narrow accountability so much that people have to almost forget who they are in order to belong there, it is no wonder that the experience does not carry much into the rest of their life.
In Farnsworth et al., 2016, p. 156
Such conditions risk disconnecting trainees from their emerging professional selves, reducing the long-term meaningfulness and sustainability of their practice.
Additionally, mentors who were perceptive and realistic about the trainee’s workload were also better positioned to challenge unhelpful workplace pressures, such as excessive working at weekends. Placing the onus on trainee teachers to independently establish working practices that safeguard their wellbeing overlooks the influence of established school cultures and social norms, which may limit their agency.
Care
She gave me a job [to do] which made me feel useful and made me feel like I actually wasn’t just a drain on them or wasn’t just dependent on her.
Participant 4
Trainees were inherently vulnerable to feeling like a burden on mentors and school staff. When they felt valued, listened to and that their work could be useful to the team, this increased their resilience. When mentor support was responsive to trainees’ personal areas for development, directing them to tasks that could support their learning and integration, this also made trainees feel valued. When support was general, surface-level or characterised by judgement, this reinforced feelings of being a burden, which diminished resilience. The mentor’s ongoing appreciation of the trainee’s role as a learner is a key factor in fostering resilience.
Belonging
It made me feel not part of the academy, it made me feel not part of a teacher, I was just a person that existed within the building.
Participant 2
Trainees can feel isolated and transient in their school placements. When mentors support them to feel part of the school and the profession, this supports their resilience. When trainees did not experience belonging, this hindered their resilience and development of a professional identity that felt authentic. A sense of belonging was often linked to simple acts, such as including trainees during lunch breaks and taking the time to get to know them as individuals.
The theme of belonging emerged as a unifying thread in trainees’ experiences, shaping how they engaged with challenges and opportunities throughout their training. For example, trainees who felt that their mentors valued them as individuals experienced a stronger sense of belonging, which enabled them to navigate power imbalances more confidently and take greater ownership of their professional development.
Discussion
The themes of power, care and belonging offer practical insights into optimising mentoring relationships to foster resilience, providing valuable content for mentor training. However, the trainee also has an important role in recognising their agency in their own development.
We chose to prioritise belonging as a focus area at Stockton SCITT because findings showed that it was central to other aspects of trainees’ experiences of resilience. In addition, as a well-established training provider with strong links with local schools, belonging is a central part of Stockton SCITT’s culture. We wanted to be more purposeful about how we communicate this throughout our partnerships to ensure consistency in trainee experience.
How the research informed practice at Stockton SCITT teacher educator (mentor) training
- By explicitly contrasting judgmental and developmental mentoring approaches and working through case examples, teacher educator training is designed to promote conscious reflection on practice and reduce the likelihood of mentors unintentionally adopting a judgmental stance.
- Teacher educator training consistently emphasises practices that support trainees to develop their teacher identity and feel a sense of belonging during placement. This is based on the research findings and ongoing feedback from our own trainees.
- To support teacher educators to get to know their trainees and improve relationships, we work with our trainees to create a personal development profile containing reflections on their starting points and potential challenges.
Trainee teacher support
- At key points in the year, trainees attend sessions on professional behaviours, exploring socially situated dispositions and the complexity of teacher identity using Garner and Kaplan’s framework (2019). The sessions promote agency, teaching specific skills in context rather than in isolation.
- Our trainee wellbeing newsletter combines insights from the study, the ongoing feedback from trainees and collective expertise from our team into what is most relevant at the start of each term.
- Our quality-assurance processes focus on belonging throughout the year. This enables us to capture trainee impact and track mentors’ understanding of this aspect of their role. We use emerging insights to adapt and refine training and mentoring practices in response to the lived experiences of our trainees, with positive impact emerging.
Conclusion
The methodology of this study resulted in a contextualised understanding of the essence of the phenomenon: that mentors can positively influence trainees’ experiences of resilience by allowing space for holistic identity development, contributing to a more equitable learning process. Conversely, limiting the space for this identity development can negatively influence resilience. The themes of power, care and belonging provide insight that can lead to practical application in individual ITT contexts, aiming to create an environment in which trainee teachers can thrive, contributing to reduced attrition in the long term.
