The purpose of this paper is to share findings from a Master’s study exploring teacher professional learning needs with the purpose of elucidating the needs of teachers, and mentor teachers, within the school cultural context. The rationale for the research was to find out what conditions, if any, were present that may explain the high or low levels of engagement in school-based professional learning in the two schools under examination. This study coincides with a relentless neo-liberal drive across Europe to outsource most of what was traditionally seen as state investment across all public services, including education. The research methodology is a small scale qualitative research study exploring the perceptions of experienced teachers in two secondary schools. It examines the conditions which may account for different levels of engagement in this regard. The findings were examined and reported using the conceptual framework that was developed from a distillation of the preferred literature for the study (Figure 1). These were dealt with under three main headings: teacher professional learning, personal and professional needs, and school culture. The key findings show very different levels of engagement in school based teacher professional learning in the two secondary schools. These findings have serious implications for the type of whole school mentoring that needs to be offered within schools at a time when policymakers are mandating teacher professional learning and requiring the development of critical reasoning capacities for all pupils in a global knowledge world. This study is concerned with the readiness of the experienced teacher to mentor beginning teachers, and student teachers, in ways that value co-inquiry, care, agency and critical thinking within the ecology of a whole school environment. Mentoring has become a popular construct in everyday usage. The originality of this research lies in the use of productive mentoring as a framework developed by the authors and under continual interrogation.

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