Even though the notion of disadvantaged schools or schools in disadvantaged areas is widely used in educational research and administration, the ways in which disadvantaged schools are characterised as well as the indicators that are used to classify them as disadvantaged differ largely by theory and between education systems (McCoy, Quail & Smyth, 2014). Once a concrete notion of disadvantaged schools is established within an education system, it is possible to conceptualise remedial educational policies. In this regard, teacher education is a prominent policy area consisting of different fields of action (Hall, Lundin & Sibbmark, 2020). One of these fields is providing professional support for novice teachers through adaptive mentoring (van Ginkel et al., 2016). However, novice teachers only have inadequate access to mentor support in many education systems (OECD, 2018). The lack of structured mentoring for novice teachers seems to contribute to high attrition rates among teachers in the first five years of their careers. Supporting novice teachers who work at disadvantaged schools is especially relevant. Teachers are more often placed at disadvantaged schools at the beginning of their career (Allen, Burgess, Mayo, 2018; Long et al., 2012) and their academic teacher qualification often does not adequately prepare them for the teaching challenges at disadvantaged schools. Therefore, they can be expected to benefit even more than others from a mentoring approach that is tailored towards their needs.

In this paper, we aim to establish a basis for the design and further development of mentor training programmes aimed at supporting novice teachers to deal with challenges they face at disadvantaged schools and to facilitate their remedial efforts. To this end, we explore the multifaceted nature of disadvantage and how it is perceived by different stakeholders. To set up any pedagogical measure it is important to understand the terminology used in the specific context, especially if the context is possibly socially tabooed. In the development of a mentor training programme tailored to the specific needs of novice teachers at disadvantaged schools it makes sense to consider the perspective of different stakeholders. We hope to gain a deeper understanding of teacher professional development needs in these settings, ensuring that the specific needs of the school community are met and the various challenges faced by teachers are addressed.

Three main objectives guide our study:

First, we examine the perspective of policy makers in education by studying the terminology used to characterize disadvantaged schools and the indicators used to classify a school as "disadvantaged" in the respective education systems. Through a comparison of the indicators used in the various education systems, we show different vantage points of disadvantage and consequentially different potential approaches of how to set up pedagogical measures such as an adaptive mentoring programme.

Second, we investigate the perspectives of novice teachers who work in schools that are classified as disadvantaged and gather insight on their perception of these school contexts. This perspective allows for a better understanding of the challenges novice teachers face in disadvantaged school contexts.

Lastly, we discuss how these analyses can inform the development of pedagogical interventions such as mentoring programmes tailored to the disadvantaged school context

For this paper, we used data from ex ante and interim evaluation studies of the ERASMUS+ policy experiment NEST (Novice Educator Support and Training). The project aims to establish an adaptive mentor training programme and is conducted simultaneously in Austria, Belgium (regions of Flanders and Wallonia), Bulgaria, Romania, and Spain (regions of Madrid and Catalonia). To capture the perspective of the educational administration, we used document analyses and guided interviews with educational experts in the participating countries. All participating education systems were asked to provide documentation on an administrative level on how disadvantaged schools are classified or identified in the respective education system. To verify our understanding of the documents, we interviewed educational experts of the administrative level such as representatives from educational ministries or school inspectorates. The guided interviews focused on terminology and criteria for disadvantaged schools, support measures, and possible negative consequences for disadvantaged schools and working conditions at disadvantaged schools. All interviews were led online between October and November 2021. To describe the novice teachers’ perspective of disadvantaged schools, we relied on questionnaire data. The NEST mentors work with two successive cohorts of novice teachers: one cohort for the school year 2021/2022, and one cohort for the school year 2022/2023. Currently we only have data available for the first teacher cohort (school year 2021/2022). All novice teachers (N=911) had at maximum five years of teaching experience and were on average 32.4 years old with a median age of 30. The majority of novice teachers was female (73.7%). The questionnaires we used to capture the novice teachers’ perspective included a prompt to estimate various aspects of the backgrounds of students at the novice teachers’ schools, which we adapted from TALIS (Principal Questionnaire, 2018, p. 8). Novice teachers were asked to estimate proportions regarding the composition of students at their schools. For example, novice teachers were asked to estimate the percentage of students with special needs or the percentage of students from ethnic minorities. Additionally, the questionnaire included a set of Likert-type items on potentially missing resources hindering quality instruction (TALIS Principal Questionnaire, 2018 p. 20). Novice teachers were asked to rate to what extent their schools’ capacity to provide quality instruction is hindered by 14 different issues such as “insufficient internet access” or “shortage of support personnel” on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 4 (a lot).

The document analyses on terminology and designating indicators used for disadvantaged schools brought several interesting results to light. First, we found a distinction between stigmatising terminology and neutral terminology for disadvantaged schools in our data. The categorisation of terminology showed that it remains difficult to find a term for disadvantaged schools that encapsulates the challenging situation of the schools without creating a stigma. Second, we found that in research literature as well as in our data, the following typology could be applied as an ordering structure to the indicators used to designate disadvantaged schools. While in research literature we only found input and output indicators to describe disadvantaged schools (Hall et al., 2020; Kyriakides et al., 2019), in our document analyses and expert interviews we also found context indicators. However, the majority of education systems base their classification of disadvantaged schools on input indicators only. The indicators used to classify schools as disadvantaged to some extent reflect the restraints or challenges that teachers perceive at these schools. Overall, novice teachers perceived moderate restraints or challenges. If they did perceive challenges, they were mostly focused on input (perceived lack of support personnel, lack of materials). According to the novice teachers in all education systems, they perceived overall higher restraints for quality instruction through lack of human resources. Regarding novice teachers’ perceptions of student body compositions, we found high levels of variance within education systems. This could be grounded in novice teachers’ ignorance of these data. However, it could also indicate that the student body compositions vary strongly between schools in one education system. This in turn would indicate that it is not sufficient to base interventions for disadvantaged schools on the most prevalent average challenges within an education system, but instead develop adaptive interventions better targeted to the individual school.

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