Mentor training & mentoring programme design
Most mentoring schemes are dead by month four.
Kaurah designs and delivers inclusive mentoring programmes for people teams, trusts and leadership teams. We train your mentors, structure the cycle, and hand you something you can run again without us.
14 pages on why mentoring schemes fail. No cost.
Founded by Shana Francis Senior lecturer in initial teacher education MA Leadership in Education (Distinction) CMI Level 7 Coaching and Mentoring Original research into inclusive mentoring practice
Why mentoring schemes stop working
Most organisations have run one already. The pattern repeats.
Mentors were never trained to mentor.
Being good at the job is not the same as being able to develop someone else in it. Without training, mentors default to advice and war stories, and the mentee leaves with nothing they can use.
Matching was done on availability.
Pairs get made from who said yes and who had a free hour. When the match is wrong, both people know by session two and neither says so.
Nobody knows what session four looks like.
The first meeting runs on goodwill. By the third there is nothing left to talk about, meetings get rescheduled, and the scheme quietly stops without anyone deciding to stop it.
There is nothing to report at the end.
No baseline, no endline, no evidence of what changed. The scheme cannot be defended at budget time, so it is not renewed.
14 pages on why mentoring schemes fail. No cost.
What a mentoring programme includes
One cycle, one term. Everything below is included in a full programme, and individual parts can be bought on their own.
Design
A scoping session with your sponsor, a written readiness report, and a matching protocol drawn from our research rather than from availability.
Mentor training
One full day or two half days, in person or online. Inclusive mentoring practice, the difference between mentoring and advising, and how to work with difference in the room instead of avoiding it. Every mentor leaves with a session-by-session playbook covering the full cycle.
Mentee support
A 90-minute onboarding session so mentees know what to bring and what to ask for, plus a progress record each of them builds across the cycle.
Measurement and handover
Baseline and endline surveys, a written impact report your sponsor can present as it is, and facilitator materials licensed to you so the next cohort runs in-house.
How it runs
- Length
- One term, typically 12 weeks
- Cohort size
- 12 to 24 mentors, matched to mentees
- Delivery
- Mentor training in person. Everything else online.
- Your time
- One sponsor conversation at the start, one at the end. We run the rest.
- After it ends
- You keep the materials and can run the next cohort yourself.
If fewer than 80% of pairs are still meeting at the end of the cycle, we run the next mentor training at no charge.
We run two cohorts per term. January cohorts need to be confirmed by early December.
Mentor training for organisations and trusts
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People and talent teams running a workplace mentoring scheme that needs to produce evidence at the end of it.
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Trusts and multi-academy groups training mentors at scale, including ECT mentors and staff supporting early career colleagues.
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Leadership teams who want senior people mentoring well rather than mentoring often.
If you have run a scheme before and it faded, that is the usual starting point.
The research behind it
Our frameworks come from two places.
The first is original research into inclusive mentoring, looking at what makes mentoring relationships work across difference and where they break down.
The second is initial teacher education, which is the most mentoring-dense professional system in the UK. Every trainee has a trained mentor, a structured placement and a formal review, and the quality of that mentoring decides whether people stay in the profession. The structures we use in organisations come from there.
Why mentoring schemes fail, and what to do differently
14 pages on the four failure points, the matching decisions that cause most of them, and what to put in place before you launch.
14 pages on why mentoring schemes fail. No cost.
Who runs it
I train teachers. That means I spend my working life on the thing most organisations treat as a side activity: how one person develops another, deliberately, against a standard, with evidence at the end of it.
I became a senior lecturer by 28 by climbing the system rather than leaving it, and I have watched mentoring work and fail at close range for years. My research looks at inclusive mentoring specifically, because the schemes that fail hardest tend to fail the people they were set up to support.
Kaurah is where that work goes into organisations.
BSc Sports and Exercise Science. PGCE. MA Leadership in Education (Distinction). CMI Level 7 Coaching and Mentoring. Senior lecturer in initial teacher education.
Start with a conversation
A scoping call is 30 minutes. We look at what you have already tried, who the scheme is meant to serve, and whether a programme is the right answer. You get a short written summary afterwards either way.
Or email hello@kaurah.com directly.