A pressing challenge for improving education systems in many European countries and internationally is to understand the conditions enabling new teachers to experience professional learning that supports deep engagement with effective pedagogies. This relates to system-wide ambitions for school improvement, based on substantial evidence that the quality of teachers makes the biggest impact on pupils’ learning at classroom level (Husbands and Pearce, 2013; Barber and Mourshed, 2007).  The importance for teachers of collaborative, dialogic professional learning arrangements in schools was identified by the OECD (2014) but problems in realising this goal were highlighted, for example finding that between 22% and 45% of teachers in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Italy, Spain, and Sweden reported that they had never received feedback in their current school. Leadership has been identified as a crucial factor and Hardy (2008) argues that professional learning practices suffer when schools experience ‘policy tensions’ in working with improvement initiatives. Competing priorities affect both the school culture and micro-level interactions between practitioners.

A key element of collaborative professional learning, especially for beginning teachers, is mentoring. The wide ethical and socially responsible dimensions of mentoring are highlighted by the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC), within a growing global ‘professionalisation’ of mentoring (EMCC and International Coach Federation, 2011). These developments indicate that mentoring goes beyond a concern with individual mentor-mentee relationships, placing these within broader school contexts and goals for professional learning. Despite long-standing recognition of the role played by effective induction and mentoring in the professional learning of new teachers (Wang et al, 2008) however, there is limited research which explores the contribution of these practices to wider capacity-building within education systems. This study focuses on Wales and New Zealand, countries in which recent policy-making has highlighted the induction and mentoring of new teachers within national concerns to develop schools as sites of professional learning which can improve pupil outcomes. As small countries sharing many geo-political, demographic and socio-cultural features, they are relevant contexts for national studies of how induction and mentoring experiences are perceived by key participants. Our study addresses the need to understand the interactions, wider practices and beliefs which constitute induction and mentoring within schools where ambitious national policies are interpreted and enacted.

The following research questions are explored using quantitative analysis of data generated by the Langdon Induction and Mentoring Survey (LIMS) (Langdon et al, 2012):

1. What are the perceptions of induction and mentoring held by school leaders, induction mentors, new teachers and classroom teachers in Wales and New Zealand?

2. What do the participants’ combined values, understandings and practices indicate regarding the capacity-building potential of schools to meet contemporary demands for professional learning?

Two related concepts are used to explore these questions: ‘comprehensive induction (CI)’ (Langdon in press) and ‘educative mentoring’ (Norman and Feiman-Nemser, 2005; Langdon and Ward, 2015). CI proposes that induction and mentoring practices take place within multidimensional school systems, constructed by regional policy, leadership, critical resources, mentoring relationships, values and vision. CI draws upon the affordances of communities of practice (Wenger, McDermott and Snyder, 2002), by which schools are dynamic and constantly evolving, constructed by their participants’ interactions in contexts of internal and external policy change. Educative mentoring is a set of practices, values and beliefs which engage participants in interacting towards socially responsible goals for learning and teaching. It aims to extend critically informed pedagogies that can increase educational opportunities and contribute to social justice within increasingly diverse societies. This study is timely where policy-making may lack sufficient attention to school as a ‘complex’ in which the relations between key participants constitute the professional learning environment and what can be achieved.

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