School quality matters: how mentoring can be restructured to support beginning teachers in different schools from a social capital perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study qualitatively and exploratively investigates mentoring for four beginning teachers from four schools with different levels of quality, as defined by the local education authority, to explore whether school quality positively correlates with the effectiveness of mentoring from a social capital perspective. We found that beginning teachers in high-quality schools are more likely to obtain effective mentoring than their colleagues working in disadvantaged and ordinary schools because they have more significant opportunities to obtain high-quality social capital through mentoring networks. This study proposes a regional support system for restructuring mentoring to support beginning teachers in different schools. Several insights that emerge from the results are discussed.