Withdraw or pause

For a variety of reasons, staff may need to pause or withdraw their active participation as a mentor in the EdTA. To pause or withdraw from the scheme, please email our EdTA team (IAD.cpdframework@ed.ac.uk) to notify us of your situation.

Pause or withdraw?

Some staff encounter challenges during their time mentoring on the EdTa, for example:

• Illness: If you have been suffering from an illness that is impacting your ability to work or study
• Bereavement: If someone in your life has passed away
• Caring responsibilities: If you are anticipating new caring responsibilities to children or dependents
• Change to duties at work: If your role at the university has changed in a significant way (i.e., workload, teaching, research commitments, etc.)
• Leaving the university

If you have any of the above occurring and it’s impacting your ability to mentor on our scheme, please email the EdTA team. In your email to us, please outline why you need to pause or withdraw.

Here are our recommendations for pausing or withdrawing:

Pause option: For shorter disruptions of work/study (up to 6 months), please notify us and we will provide advice and confirm a brief pause to your EdTA mentoring. You need not provide detailed reasoning or documentation. In this case, we will confirm a pause and ask you to reach out to your mentees and ask them if they are OK to work independently during your ‘down-time’. If this is acceptable to your mentees, simply agree to contact them once you return to business-as-usual.

If any of your mentees are aiming to complete or submit in the near future, we may want to provide a new mentor to them. If this is the case, please share the correspondence with our team and we will arrange for the new mentor. 

Withdraw option: If you need to be off work for more than 6 months or are leaving the university, we will recommend that you withdraw from the EdTA. Please notify us if you need to withdraw. We will remove you as an ‘active mentor’ and will no longer contact you to ask for new mentoring opportunities. If your situation changes, please email our team, and you can restart mentoring at any time. 

Often long-term leave can be due to sudden or unexpected events and we understand that there are many reasons that you might not be able to notify us right away. But, when you are able to, please let us know as soon as possible as you have individuals relying on you for your support and guidance.