Orr and Simmons (2010) stated that the English further education (FE) sector had “suffered from significant under-funding and a lack of strategic direction” and until “the 1990’s it was essentially a rather unfashionable locally-run service on the margins of English education” (p.77).  This was reflected in the lack of policy surrounding the training of teachers in the sector. In 2000, the UK Department for Education and Skills (DfES) in their report Colleges for Excellence and Innovation made allusions towards a situation where all teachers in FE holding posts of any significant size would have been teacher trained. However, this was not enforced until September 2001.

This paper focuses on the experiences of new teachers in the English FE sector during their first year of practice just over ten years after the introduction of mandatory training. More specifically, the research will examine support offered to the trainee within the structure of their Initial Teacher Training (ITT) programme. As 90% of FE teachers undertake their ITT on a part-time in-service basis, whilst undertaking paid teaching (Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET), 2009), the need for a support system is warranted. The role of the mentor in particular has been reported to have a significant impact on the trainee teacher (e.g. Butcher, 2002) and perhaps this is not surprising considering that teachers in FE “traditionally…have been employed for the vocational skills they have in another occupation, rather than their teaching skills” (Bathmaker & Avis, 2005 p. 49).

Furthermore, Ofsted (2003) documented the benefits of a trainee experiencing mentoring, in particular subject-specific mentoring, but worryingly reported “few opportunities are provided for trainees to learn how to teach their specialist subjects, and there is a lack of systematic mentoring in the workplace” (p. 5).

It is the perceptions of the trainees themselves that are central to this research; more specifically the research will focus on three key questions:

1.      How does mentoring feature in the experiences of new teaching staff in FE during their first year of practice?

2.      What are FE mentors perceptions of their role?

3.      Can an FE specific model of mentoring be developed?

Engestrom’s (1999) ‘activity system’ was used to develop the conceptual framework for this paper. The system was useful for understanding how a wide range of factors can work together to impact on an activity. For the purpose of this research, the activity would be the training and support of new teachers in FE and as such the model can be used to examine the range of factors, in particular mentoring, that might impact on their experiences.

The study was conducted within a social constructivism framework as its theoretical or philosophical underpinning (Gergen, 2001). This perspective views reality as being socially constructed and is developed through convention, human perception and social experience.  Therefore, the perceptions of the trainee teacher will be constructed “as a result of individual cognition” (Hick, 1996, p. 71) and will be “personal, subjective and unique” (von Glaserfield, 1996, p. 5).

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