Mentoring has become increasingly popular during recent years and particularly so in the provision of leadership development, including the mentoring of school principals. In New Zealand, many of these mentoring programmes are developed and funded by central government and are mostly designed to meet the needs of those in their initial years of principalship. Mentoring for experienced principals has not typically been resourced in this manner and tends to be less prevalent and more ad hoc in nature. This article reports on an evaluation of one peer-mentoring group of experienced primary (elementary) school principals in Auckland, New Zealand. While the principals identified a number of components of the mentoring process as being valuable, issues related to status, learning and safety were particularly highlighted. The results informed the development of a model of peer mentoring processes for experienced principals based on the notion of communities of practice. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)