Mentors as gate-keepers: an exploration of professional formation

In this account of a longitudinal study into mentors' perceptions of weakness in trainees during initial teacher training in England there are indications that teachers' ideas about what makes a good professional have been influenced by the increasingly prescriptive formulae which the government has introduced. The study begins to investigate how the mentor group has incorporated the training framework into its 'commonsense' understanding of professional priorities. The findings are based on the results of a questionnaire ranking exercise given between 1996 and 1998 to 273 secondary school mentors in the Keele partnership at their annual training conference.