Mentoring for school leaders: a rapid evidence assessment
Timeline
January 2025 - July 2025
Status
In progress
Project overview
School leaders play a pivotal role in shaping school culture and improving student outcomes, yet they face growing pressures from increased workloads, complex student needs, staff recruitment challenges, budget constraints, heightened accountability, and the social and emotional needs of pupils. Leadership roles can also be isolating, limiting opportunities for reflection and support, and potentially discouraging future leaders from pursuing these positions.
Mentoring has been proposed as a valuable tool to build leadership capacity and improve job satisfaction through facilitative relationships aimed at learning and organisational effectiveness. However, evidence on their specific impacts and how best to measure them is unclear. Moreover, detailed description of mentoring models and features are needed to support scalable implementation. This review uses a rapid evidence assessment to explore mentoring models, mentor-mentee characteristics, impact evidence, and research instruments for measuring impact, with the aim of informing policy.
Research aims
- To identify and describe different models or approaches for mentoring school leaders.
- To examine the characteristics of mentors and mentees in school leadership mentoring.
- To assess the available evidence on the impact of mentoring school leaders.
- To explore the research instruments used to evaluate the impact of mentoring school leaders.
Methodology
- Conducting a rapid evidence assessment on EPPI Reviewer.
Project team
- Professor Sin-Wang Chong, Honorary Research Professor and Head of Evidence Synthesis, NIoT
- Dr Marta Ciesielska, Research Fellow in Research Synthesis, NIoT
- Patrick Covernton, Research Assistant, NIoT
- Dr Violeta Negrea, Research Fellow in Research Synthesis, NIoT
- Gene Payne, Regional Principal, NIoT
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