Mentoring

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Student mentoring links young people with an employer mentor. A national survey in 2008 found 2,500 mentors working in schools across England. Mentoring can take various forms and usually involves regular meetings over a period of time spanning a school term to a year.

Mentors can support students who:

  • would benefit from extra support in the transition to adulthood
  • are working on enterprise or science and technology projects
  • are studying for the new Diploma in a particular area of work.

Mentoring can involve building a one-to-one, face-to-face relationship with a student or working with a group of young people. Some programmes have developed online mentoring, where the relationship is via email exchanges or through a blog.

There is good evidence to show, that when done well, mentoring programmes help young people to do better in their school work and exams.

 

Employer involvement in student mentoring

Some large organisations have developed their own flagship student mentoring programmes. Employees, whatever the size of their company, have also become mentors through their local Education Business Partnership Organisation (EBPO). These can be found throughout England (although please note that that not all organise business mentoring schemes). Vodafone has worked with West Berkshire Education Business Partnership on a mentoring and coaching programme.

Elsewhere, schools and colleges sometimes organise their own mentoring scheme. For example, PricewaterhouseCoopers has supported the mentoring programme at Harris Academy in Southwark for several years.

Companies whose employees have mentored students include:

Suggestions for mentoring schemes involving smaller businesses and public sector employers that might be profiled on these pages are welcome.  Please contact: feedback@educationandemployers.org.

 

Getting started

FURTHER INFO