Perspectives on teacher standards in the mentoring process: insights from mentors and early career teachers in an Australian context

Mentoring programmes are considered a core component of professional learning approaches for early career teachers (ECTs) as they commence in and progress through the first few years in the profession. Mentoring in the contemporary Australian context, however, is situated within a culture of high teacher standardisation, as is the case in numerous countries across the word. The Australian Professional Standards for Teachers ("the Standards"), for example, are the measuring device against which full teacher registration of ECTs is awarded as well as being put forward as the framework that informs teacher goal setting and development. In such circumstances, lines between mentoring purposed for teacher growth and for accountability may be blurred, and mentoring may be delimited to teachers' work privileged in the Standards. In this paper, we report on data collected and thematically analysed from semi-structured interviews with 15 mentors and 15 ECTs from eight independent schools across Queensland and New South Wales in Australia about the role of the Standards in their mentoring work. Findings demonstrated that these mentors and ECTs address the Standards during mentoring ranging from regulatory to developmental to cursory. These findings have implications for the development of mentoring programmes, in Australia and elsewhere, where mentoring occurs in neoliberal cultures of audit.