Assertive Mentoring provides the vehicle for ensuring that these often separate entities are brought together and wrapped around the child. The child remains central to the whole process throughout.
“The Assertive Mentoring system brings together many outstanding school systems together in one place. It can form the basis of a focused, child centred collaborative approach based on a dialogue about the child’s present and future learning needs. The system is outstanding and should have a significant impact upon the motivation and progress of pupils.” (G. Downey SIP 2008)
All schools will have their own systems in place for these aspects of school review and improvement. These can be reviewed and either adopted or adapted for mentoring purposes. Crucially, for Assertive Mentoring this information is shared with the child in an understandable and consistent format.
Assertive mentoring takes targets from the head’s desk to the child’s head. It gives all stakeholders: teachers, managers, parents and pupils a framework which makes sense of these often unrelated activities and provides a focus on the individual child achieving their potential.
Assertive Mentoring is a guaranteed, regular, one to one dialogue between pupil and mentor. It is evidence based and focussed on ‘The Triple A’:
- Attainment
- Achievement
- Attitude
Progress towards long term targets is reviewed as well as the achievement of medium term targets. Further meaningful medium term targets are agreed. Targets are carefully chosen from agreed assessment criteria so as to be both challenging yet achievable and to have the greatest impact on performance. These targets transfer to pupils’ personal mentor files and form the focus of continual assessment, marking, feedback and support.