PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore school-based mentors' perceptions of the non-statutory National Standards for school-based initial teacher training (ITT) mentors in England.Design/methodology/approachTaking the form of a qualitative survey, the paper explores the views of mentors in relation to the potential use of the National Standards in supporting the mentoring role and in enhancing the experiences of pre-service teachers during school placements.FindingsThe paper reports that the National Standards have the potential to support the role of mentoring in ITT if used in ways that support mentor recognition and reward.Practical implicationsIn the absence of any common training model for mentors in England, there is potential that the National Standards could offer mentors some guidance for the role to support more equitable experiences for pre-service teachers.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the field since it accesses mentor voices about matters that involve them. The paper draws attention to the impoverished representation of mentoring in the National Standards, whilst paradoxically noting that in the absence of any common mentoring framework, mentors perceive that the standards could offer some support for mentors and mentees alike.

This paper is concerned with the current achievement gap policy agenda and associated material and discursive power that shape teachers’ work in schools with high child poverty rates. More specifically, it explores how a university/school research collaboration – Local Matters – can disturb such forms of subjectivation by enabling educators to resist such policy agendas/discourses by drawing on locally contextualized knowledge and place-based evidence. Based on fieldwork undertaken over the past three years at over forty schools with eighty-four teachers across five Local Authority regions in Northern England, we provide a critical discourse analysis of a series of semi structured interviews and focus group activities of those who participated in the project. Based on an interdiscursive and linguistic analysis of the data we show how educators wrestle with the tensions between attempting to enact a social justice, collaborative and a democratic pedagogic approach and dealing with policy requirements that focus on the achievement gap problem and associated ‘what works’ discourse solution. Through the enactment of the program we show how educators, in collaboration with activist researchers, can develop forms of principled resistance that shake up and unsettle dominant forms of child poverty practice and discourses in schools.

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