2) Mentoring, tutoring, teaching

Just before Christmas, the government brought a new bill to parliament which will alter the guidelines and law governing the way that children in care are looked after. There are many provisions to this bill, but one section includes the proposal that all cared for children should have a designated teacher in their school. I thought it interesting that coverage of this legislation seemed to merge teaching, tutoring and mentoring as essentially a single type of activity, so in the Times Educational supplement the designated teacher was described as a mentor http://www.tes.co.uk/search/story/?story_id=2463245 . This is not an isolated instance in the educational world, for example, a new e-mentoring product is being advertised which combines mentoring with eliminating truancy http://www.bettshow.com/page.cfm/Action=Press/PressID=33 . I accept that no one has a copyright on the definition of mentoring. However, at The Brightside Trust we have instinctively seen mentoring relationships as being a voluntary relationship in a relatively free social setting. I’d say this was the case across the mentoring community, for example, in most business mentoring schemes it is not usually seen as a good idea for someone with direct management responsibility to also be someone’s mentor. This is not the case in schools where teachers as responsible adults always stand in authority over children and the notion of the volunteer seems to be in the old military sense of volunteering, ‘you, you and you’. I think the power relations between teachers and pupils are fundamentally unbalanced and cannot flip-flop between an authority and a mentoring relationship. Any suspension of such power relations is dependent on the good will of the powerful, the teacher, and most children will be well aware as to how fragile such interactions are. I think the government would be wise to look to the existing system of independent visitors for cared for children (see the existing NCH example http://www.nch.org.uk/getinvolved/index.php?i=117) to provide mentoring in what are overtly voluntary relationships rather than to see this as an appropriate role for a designated teacher.