European national education systems undergoing extensive reforms such as The Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM: Sahlberg, 2015) has seen education policy designers striving for standardization of the teaching profession to ensure a basic level of teacher “quality”. This direction has been based on the following premises:

• quality is missing in the teaching workforce due to lack of uniformity of performance (Ball, 2012);
• quality can be both defined and measured by national and international literacy, numeracy and science skill tests such as PISA (Schleicher, 2011);
• countries can be fairly compared on these results (Schleicher, 2012);
• countries with the highest scores are using “evidence based, best practice” (OECD, 2014);
• new public management techniques, such as contractualism, are the way to achieve the best practice goal across education systems in all countries (Tolofari, 2005); and,
• enactment of policy should be clearly proscribed so that teachers can enact the orderly roll out of “best practice” (Bowles, Hattie, Dinham, Scull, & Clinton, 2014).

These assumptions can be thought of as a set of guiding principles that have been developed for educating pre-service teachers and inducting them into the school system. A decade ago, sensing the ramifications of these policy settings Cochran-Smith (2005) prophetically argued that teacher education risked becoming too narrow. We are now seeing increasing levels of mandatory requirements, framed around accountability systems that have replaced professional trust (Tschannen-Moran, 2014), and mentoring is now guided by system-level teaching standards rather than individual teachers’ development (Hargreaves, 2013; Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012). The mentoring styles that have emerged during this period can be conceived in a number of ways. The most common is that they largely reflect a new public management approach: a deficit model of protégé as in need of expert guidance, rather than a process of growth or enhancement of highly motivated individuals who are fully committed to be(com)ing the best teachers they can be, through experimenting with the curriculum in context, interacting with peers and other experts, and, forming, maintaining and reflecting on the complex professional relationships with the students in their care.

In this paper we consider how this phenomenon might be “a mental conditioning” that is occurring, which “systematically reflect[s] the interests of those with greater economic clout and political power” (Deneulin, 2008, p.119). As part of this consideration we critically examine whether this phenomenon could be highlighting the NPM performativity through the accountability agenda. A more insidious but no less logical view of the new mentoring/coaching conflation is to view new mentoring as a way of inculcating non-reflective functional stupidity in the teaching workforce (Alvesson & Spicer, 2012; Paulsen, 2016). With the emphasis on “swift to adapt, slow to complain” (Schleicher, 2007, p.5) functional stupidity is not the opposite of functional intelligence, but rather a way of producing institutional compliance for specific rewards. The functionally stupid aspect is not the rewards but discounting the motivation of the protégé being mentored/coached. 

While many isolated instances of mentoring may be working well under this regime, in many countries it appears that mentoring as a system fails the profession. This has partly resulted from the NPM technique of co-opting and reframing agreeable concepts to its own purpose. Who, for instance, would argue against autonomy? But the practice of autonomy in schools demands that teachers and leaders are accountable for things they have very little control over, or inadequate resources to effectively address them if they could muster some control. Similarly, the renaming of coaching as mentoring has repositioned a humanistic practice into a performance and accountability discourse with mentors acting as trainers who “review and record overall [protégé] achievement” (NASBTT, 2015, p.2).  

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