Students will meet with their mentor each morning for 15 minutes and each fortnight for an hour. Throughout the year, during that hour, the mentor and student will discuss goal-setting, career education, alcohol and drug awareness, learning styles, internet safety, and learning progress.
Mentors will be trained in implementing the scheme and key points of their conversation with assigned students will be recorded.
The mentor also will meet biannually with parents at family learning conferences to set and review learning goals and the mentor will be the family's first point of contact with the college throughout the year.
Mr Shepherd said the traditional form teacher role had become mostly administrative "dealing with attendance and school notices, with no emphasis on pastoral care or learning needs".
"From this point forward, we won't be talking about form classes, we'll be talking about mentor groups," he said.
"We need to change the way we think about our job at this school from teachers of subjects to teachers of learning."
Educational behavioural consultant Margaret Ross visited the school at the start of the term to help staff launch the programme.
"Mentoring isn't new, it's probably the oldest thing ever, but we've forgotten how to do it," she said.
"The question we are trying to answer is what will really change a person's behaviour to direct it towards what they want? As teachers, we often teach knowledge and skills, but we also need to take into the account social purpose and the value of what they are doing.
"Mentoring will change that person's behaviour by directing it towards what they want.
"If you really want to mentor someone, you have to get inside their head and you really can't do that until you really think about what's going on inside your own head. Mentors can be the difference (for students) between doing what's been done before and becoming the first person in their family who goes to university."
