Co-funded by the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) through the Erasmus+ Programme, NEST started on February 2021 and will last until February 2024. The Novice Educator Support and Training (NEST) projecct will be carried out by a consortium of 16 partners, including seven public authorities, five NGO members of the Teach For All network, an evaluation team and two additional partners that provide advisory support and “critical eyes” over the whole lifetime of the project. The overall objective of the project is to design, implement, evaluate and propose a system of new adaptive mentoring for novice teachers in disadvantaged schools.
Evidence shows that mentorship is critical for supporting novice teachers in disadvantaged schools, yet structured induction programmes remain rare and few novice teachers have access to high-quality mentorship. The NEST consortium believes that effective mentoring of novice teachers could save time and costs, increasing effectiveness, job satisfaction, retention and attractiveness of the profession.
NEST will design, pilot and demonstrate that its underpinning adaptive mentoring model is a relevant and effective solution to the need to increase effectiveness, motivation and ultimate retention of novice teachers working at disadvantaged schools. The experiment will include two successive cohorts of novice teachers: one cohort for the school year 2021/2022 and one cohort for the school year 2022/2023. Each cohort consists of one group intervention group (receiving adaptive mentoring) and one control group (receiving the prevalent mentoring).
The outcomes of the project will provide transnational learnings and offer a roadmap for potential methodologies for improving the support of novice teachers. Specifically, the knowledge generated is expected to be transferable and scalable to public authorities, policy-makers, certification agencies, universities, and non-government organizations seeking to adopt adaptive support for novice teachers within their contexts.
