Every school or academy desires to be at a minimum good to outstanding in their Ofsted inspections. However, many schools that may be outstanding overall are let down by in house mentoring programmes that are either in Special Measures (SM) or in the Need To Improve (NTI) categories.

I do not mean to be harsh but for many schools and academies mentoring is simply an after thought or a good idea lacking the right support, resource or commitment to make it work.
In this series, I would like to share 10 vital tips that will help your school or academy get your mentoring programme from SM or NTI to either good to outstanding if you implement these tips:

1. Professionally Mentor Trained Staff
Anything that you do, can be done either well or poorly, so to avoid this cross your i’s and dot your t’s by training your staff who mentor.

For years I have observed the travesty of organisations that assume because they’re staff are older than the students they can mentor them. This is simply not true. Being a mentor requires unique skill sets, aptitudes, life experiences and emotional, social and cultural intelligences that enable some to yield better results than others as mentors.

So don’t set up your staff to fail or students to have negative mentoring experiences, by simply professionally mentor training all staff with mentoring responsibilities as a basic necessity.

2. A Structured Programme
It is great to have mentors however, it is even greater to have strategic frameworks i.e. programmes that they can operate within. By doing so you can quality assure your mentoring operations and guide your mentors in a standardised way. This will help you to monitor and evidence your ROI plus your quantitative and qualitative impact.

3. Asset Based Model
In sport, media, entertainment and business you usually gain a mentor when you are doing well (asset based) so why is it that in schools students predominantly gain a mentor when they are under performing? This is a deficit model, which is not inspiring at all. If you have an asset based model it promotes that all students are valued and have equal rights to achievement.

4. Senior Leadership Team (SLT)
In having a significant member of the SLT (especially a Vice or Deputy) with the mentoring lead brief it really helps those who are mentoring on the ground. The last thing a school needs is a programme that is not supported by the staff, so having significant leadership from SIP to morning briefings really helps move things forward.

5. Community Collaboration
Whether it is the rest of the learning community, teaching community or the wider community when you have a well-balanced and professionally marketed mentoring programme it will always attract greater support. This makes it a win / win for the school, students and families from the community as everyone collaborates.

This is the end of part one and I hope it helped.

If you are in the process of developing your own mentoring programme or just exploring the possibilities this could really save you much time, resources and decrease the cost of human carnage.

Pilots don’t have to start from ground zero with so much information out there so just consider what would be helpful for your school, students, community and staff to ensure you build according to need.

Shortly, I will soon publish part 2 of this series, which will be a must for those who are serious about developing an effective in house mentoring programme.

Happy Mentoring