Ten salient practices drawn from a large-scale literature review of mentoring practice over the last two decades are described. Then, the findings from interviews with 32 award-winning mentors from around the world are used to exemplify particular practices and highlight the characteristics and values of award-winning mentors. In so doing a database of award-winning mentors and the nature of the awards processes around the world is used to explore recognition and reward in relation to academic careers. Disciplinary differences in practices are discerned where possible at the broad subject level, e.g., in STEM the limitations for lab-based disciplines on facilitating open-ended inquiry with large classes, countered by excellent use of layered lab models for creating a sense of research community and vertical, peer and near-peer mentoring opportunities. In addition, the practices that mentors find particularly challenging are described. The implications of these findings for mentor training are outlined and a brief review of mentor training schemes provided. The way that mentors view the future of their mentoring practice concludes the chapter.

Introduction

Public service education has been hard won but is not yet fully achieved in many countries around the world – and where it is seemingly in place, it is not secure and is being actively privatised. In this book we not only report research about how and why this is happening, but we also specifically focus on the contribution of corporate elites to the ideas, conditions and materiality of the reform of public education. Such corporate elites do not usually have a personal or family stake in schools for the masses, because their purchasing power is greater than those they are acting as benefactors for. Indeed, as Dorling (2014b) reports, ‘in the US, the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population now takes 20 per cent of all income before tax. In the UK, that figure stands at around 15 per cent’ (pp 36-8). Such corporate elites are not only very wealthy, but are globally mobile and networked, and can locate across national boundaries in ways that disconnect their lives from the realities of those who support, access and rely on public services.

Elites studies has not been a strong feature of social sciences research (see Savage and Williams, 2008a), but a range of recent texts suggest that there is a serious problem with inequality and the power structures and processes that construct and sustain it (Wilkinson and Picket, 2009; Judt, 2010; Stiglitz, 2013; Dorling 2014a; Jones, 2014). Such concerns are evident within public education, where the causal relationship between poverty and educational underachievement in affluent countries is regarded as an endemic problem located in commodification and trade (Raffo et al, 2010).

Elites studies in educational policy research is also limited. Work has taken place on the economising of education policy (Ball, 2007, 2012a; Burch, 2009; Lundhal, 2011; Norris, 2011), philanthropy (Ball, 2008; Scott, 2009; Saltman, 2010), the networking role of elites (Ball and Junemann, 2012; Gunter, 2012; Spring, 2012; Au and Ferrare, 2015), and the type and impact of elites education (Kynaston, 2014; Kenway and Koh, 2015; van Zanten et al, 2015; Ye and Nylander, 2015). Elites studies is a site where the complexities of what is unfolding is being identified as being in need of a range of in-depth studies (Buckley and Burch, 2011).

Introduction

The primary research and critical analysis reported in this collection of essays has made a substantive contribution to the field of critical education policy as well as to democratic discourses, through undertaking and accessing fieldwork data and through thinking productively in order to scope and bring meaning to, the relationship between corporate elites and the reform of public education. Our goal in focusing on emerging forms of corporatised governance is not only to add to the growing body of work about the ideas, networks and strategies adopted by corporate elites, but also to reveal – and bring new perspectives to – how this has become extraordinarily ordinary. What our data and insights show is that there is an accepted normality to what is unfolding, where counter-narratives are difficult but not impossible to construct.

In this concluding chapter, we draw together key outcomes from the within-outside analysis, and consider what this means for the ongoing debates, realities and experiences of public education. Within this we put emphasis on what the reforms mean for ongoing research agendas and methodologies.

Mapping corporate elites and the reform of public education

We have set out to uncover and tell some important stories, and we have located those accounts within the wider context of critical education policy studies through drawing on analysis of global trends, the changing role of the nation state, together with the policy processes and the networks that underpin this. But the distinctive nature of the accounts that illuminate corporatised governance is that we have also shown what it actually means for people working in universities and schools, and how people are handling their often confused and contradictory location at the leading edge of corporate activity and influence – some are pushed off the edge into a void, some continue to struggle with what it means, and some leap to embrace attractive opportunities. Here we provide a summary of what our data and analysis are indicating regarding significant shifts in government, in educational institutions and professional practices, and in civil society.

Movement of educational issues from the public to the private domain

Our claim is that we are witnessing the increased dominance of the ‘private’ within privatisation through how educational issues are increasingly shifting to personal (rational? whimsical?) choice agendas. Corporate elites have both contributed to this shift and are beneficiaries of it.