REVIEW OF MENTORING PROGRAMME AS AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH FOR PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1. BACKGROUND TO MENTORING

To understand the concept of ‘mentoring’ it is first necessary to determine what exactly mentoring is.  This however seems to be easier said than done with Clutterbuck (1996:1) noting that ‘the biggest problem for researchers into mentoring is still defining what it is’ and Roberts (2000:3) using the term ‘definitional quagmire’. Hall (2003:9) partly explains this by stating ‘Mentoring is not one thing: it is a range of possibilities.  Perhaps this goes some way to explaining why there is so little agreement about its definition and why so much of the language used about it seems to lead to confusion rather than clarification’. Philip (1999:6) describes mentoring as follows: ‘Mentoring can hold a range of meanings and the terminology reveals a diverse set of underlying assumptions.  A similar range of terms may apply to the mentee, protégé, client, apprentice, aspirant, pupil etc.’

The roots of the term ‘mentor’ are commonly traced back to the figure of mentor in Homer’s Odyssey who was said to be the protective, guiding and supporting figure who acted as a wise and trusted counsellor to Telemachus.  However Colley (2000a:1) argues that this is a misreading and if there is any ‘mentoring’ done it is by the goddess Athene.  She then goes on to state that the modern associations of ‘mentor’ are held within Fenellon’s Les Adventures de Telemaque from the eighteenth century.

“Mentoring is the ‘in’ thing” (Colley 2000a:1, 2003:1).  In her article ‘Exploring myths of mentor’ (2000a:1), she then goes on to document the way that mentoring has become highly popular in the past decade as an ingredient of policy solutions; for example in the fields of teaching, nursing, careers guidance, business and increasingly in compulsory and post compulsory education – particularly within the area of social exclusion.  ‘mentoring has become mainstream. It appears in all major new youth transition programmes, such as the New Deal and the Learning Gateway, with their networks of personal advisers and proposals to involve volunteer mentors as well.  The Connexions strategy (DfEE 2000)…proposes to create a new profession of learning mentors (for young people in schools) and personal advisers (for those in post-16 transition).’ (Colley, 2000a:1).  Volunteer mentors (business mentors, communitymentors, intergenerational mentors, university student mentors, mentors with specialist knowledge) and learning mentors.

Learning mentors

The role of the learning mentor was launched in England in 1999 as part of the new government initiative ‘Excellence in Cities (EiC)’.  This was a new initiative that resulted from the recognition in the White Paper ‘Excellence in Schools’ (DfEE, 1997) that the persistent problem of low achievement and the growing problem of social exclusion needed to be tackled ‘inclusive schooling which provides a broad, flexible and motivating education that recognises the different talents of all children and delivers excellence for everyone’.

The Learning Mentor strand was one of the areas of the Excellence in Cities initiative put in place to tackle this transformation of urban education alongside City Learning Centres, Specialist Schools, Gifted and Talented, Beacon Schools, Learning Support Units and Education Action Zones.

1.1. BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY A goal of many individuals is to be successful and satisfied in their careers and/or jobs. While there are many ways an individual can achieve this end (Runciman, Dewar and Goulbourne, 2008) one method in particular; i.e. securing a mentor, has been receiving an increasing amount of attention in the management literature in the last decade Kolb, (2004). Many definitions have been proposed to describe the process of mentoring (Megginson and Clutterbuck, 1995). In general, mentoring is considered to be a developmental relationship that enhances both an individual’s growth and advancement (Allen, 1995).