Teacher shortages continue unabated in many countries across the globe.  Beginning teachers entering the profession during a time of intersecting global crises face multiple, unprecedented challenges that threaten their development as teachers and impact their decisions to leave the profession, thus exacerbating teacher shortages. Mentoring of beginning teachers by more experienced teachers has long been identified as a way of assisting beginning teachers to transition successfully into the profession. However, being an experienced teacher does not automatically translate to becoming an effective mentor (Betlem et al., 2019; Lofthouse, 2018)..Hobson (2016) suggests that mentor preparation programs include  developing effective communication skills for working with adult learners, navigating difficult conversations with mentees (Hudson and Hudson, 2010), provision of emotional support, scaffolding critical reflection on teaching and learning, and providing mentees with appropriate levels of challenge to facilitate growth as autonomous professionals. While specialist mentor training is central to effective mentoring, often teachers are assigned to mentoring roles with little or no specific training (Parker et al., 2021). .It is argued that the need for mentor training is particularly salient now to enable beginning teachers to further develop their skills and competences required for teaching in a polycrisis world.

The mentor training program that provides the context for this paper was developed in response to  national and state reviews of teacher education in Australia, the UK and Sweden, that call for beginning teachers to be supported by specialist trained mentors.The largest teacher employing authority in one state in Australia invested huge fiscal and human resources with the investement intended to support and sustain the mentor training and the enactment of mentoring in schools  Monetary equivalent was provided to schools for up to 72 hours per year of release time from class for each beginning teacher with each school principal having the autonomy to decide how the funding would be allocated and used. 

The mentor training program was developed and delivered by a team of teacher educators from a local university awarded the tender to complete the work. The program ran for six years across the state and comprised two days of face to face training for experienced teachers nominated by their principals to develop their mentoring skills and capacities. As mentoring was positioned in the training program as supportive rather than supervisory or evaluative, teachers in formal leadership roles (such as deputy principals or principals) were intentionally excluded from participating in the mentor training.The expectation was that on completion of the mentor training program, mentors would return to their schools and lead the implementation of mentoring in their particular contexts. Due to the huge input of monetary and other resources, and given that the program was a system-wide initiative that ran for an extended period of time, we wanted to investigate the extent to which mentoring was implemented and sustained in schools following cessation of the program. An activity system framework was used as a theoretical lens through which to examine the contradictions that impacted on the equitable implementation of mentoring across school settings post-participation in the  mentor training program. The paper addresses the research question: What are the enablers and constraints that impacted on implementing and sustaining mentoring in schools post-mentor training?.

While the mentor training program was a system-led and system-wide initiative, the findings revealed disparities in the implementation of mentoring in schools across the sector and were often dependent on the leadership in the schools. This paper describes how contradictions contributed as obstacles in ensuring equitable mentoring across school contexts and offers several key recommendations to strengthen the impact of systemic wide initiatives such as mentor training programs for teachers.

The research was conducted three years after the mentor training program ceased. Once university ethics was approved, an email was sent out to the teachers who completed the program inviting their participation in an online survey. Survey respondents had the option to participate in a follow-up interview. Of the 346 survey responses, 18 teachers agreed to be interviewed. This qualitative research draws on the semi-structured interviews with these trained mentors to identify facilitating and inhibiting factors impacting on the implementation of mentoring in schools following mentor training. Teachers were also asked to identify their involvement in mentoring in school contexts since completing the mentor training and whether they had participated in any further mentor training. The interviews were conducted individually via Zoom by a member of the research team and were audio-recorded. The interviews were transcribed by a professional transcription company. The interview transcripts constitute the data for this paper. Initially, an iterative approach was used by the research team to analyse the data with the transcripts read and reread using the activity systems framework as an analytic lens. Data were initially coded based on subject, object, tools, community, division of labour, and rules (Goodnough, 2019). The research team then met to discuss and further refine the codes. The analysis of the interview transcripts revealed manifestations of contradictions within and across activity systems evidenced through words and actions identified in the data.

It was evident from our findings that although the mentor training and mentoring implementation in schools was a system-led initiative, school leaders lacked awareness and understanding of the significance of mentor training or of mentoring structures and processes to support mentoring in schools. This gap in understanding contributed to the disparities in implementing and sustaining mentoring in schools. This finding confirm previous research that highlights the significant role that school leadership plays in facilitating mentoring in schools (Rinne et al., 2023) and extends it by showing how the lack of leadership support (for example, autonomy in the use of funding) amplifies contradictions in mentoring implementation. Two key recommendations are offered in light of this study. First, for systemic initiatives, such as in the focus of this study, there needs to be greater accountability back to the funding source with transparency of evidence of how funding has allocated and used for the express purpose for which it has been provided. In this case, increased accountability through a reporting requirement back to the employing authority clearly identifying what, how and why the funding was used would have ensured greater value being placed on mentoring and specialist training. Second, when a systemic initiative is announced, it must include a clear strategy to ensure shared understanding of the focus of the initiative. As school leadership teams play a key role in supporting and sustaining mentoring in schools, in this initiative, strategies needed to be in place to ensure shared understanding of mentoring and what it looks like in their specific school contexts. Activity theory as used in this research afforded us the opportunity to identify tensions within the mentor training activity system and how they impacted on the implementation of mentoring in school contexts following participation in mentor training.

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