School incentive payments for mentor engagements in training
25 February 2022
Research report on the EEF website
As part of the early roll-out of the Early Career Framework, in-school mentors undertook training in order to enable them to better carry out their role supporting early-career teachers. This project used a nimble randomised controlled trial approach to evaluate whether there was any impact on the amount of time mentors spent on their training or on mentor retention of a financial incentive payment paid to schools. The payment was made on a per mentor basis and schools were asked to spend it ‘to support [the mentor’s] participation in the programme’. The authors used data collected by the training providers’ online systems to create an estimate of time spent on training and to measure mentor dropout.
There are limitations to the conclusions that can be drawn from the findings as there were challenges around the timely payment of the incentives to schools. Late payment to schools could have had an impact on the decisions around using the additional resource. Further work is needed to understand more about the resource allocation decisions made by schools and multi-academy trusts.
Key Findings
- There was no evidence that financial payments to schools—as implemented in this trial—had an impact on the time mentors spent on their training.