What mentoring and befriending are, and how they differ
What mentoring and befriending are
Mentoring is a structured one-to-one relationship in which one person, usually with more experience of the thing in question, supports another towards a goal that both of them can name. Befriending is a structured one-to-one relationship whose purpose is the relationship itself.
Anyone who has to decide which of these two relationships a person actually needs: a coordinator writing a referral form, and the volunteer or family working out what is being asked of them.
The line between a goal and a presence. Getting that line right at the referral stage is what decides whether the match is judged fairly a year later.
A scheme advertises mentoring, recruits volunteers who wanted to befriend, then records perfectly good matches as failures because nobody ever wrote down what the match was for.
Both are supported by an organisation that recruits, checks, trains and supervises the volunteer, and both are reviewed and brought to a planned ending, even when the time is long. The difference between them is not warmth, seniority or setting. It is whether there is an outcome outside the relationship that the relationship exists to reach.
What mentoring means
Mentoring means a supported relationship pointed at something. The something can be modest and it usually is: getting to school on Tuesdays, sitting the exam, keeping the tenancy, finishing the apprenticeship, applying for the job. What makes it mentoring rather than good company is that the goal exists outside the pair, can be described in a sentence by both people, and can be reviewed. The mentor brings relevant experience, not authority: a mentor is not a supervisor, does not appraise the mentee and does not decide anything on the mentee’s behalf.
The standard ask of a volunteer mentor in the United Kingdom is about an hour a week. In youth mentoring the standard ask of the relationship is twelve months, and that figure is not a preference. Matches with young people that end before three months are associated with outcomes worse than no match at all, a finding published by Grossman and Rhodes in 2002 and repeatedly confirmed since. A scheme that cannot honestly ask a volunteer for a year should not be recruiting children into mentoring.
What befriending means
Befriending means a supported relationship whose point is the contact. Nobody is working towards anything. A befriender visits, or telephones, and the visit or the call is the whole intervention. It is offered where a life has thinned out: after a bereavement, after a stroke, after discharge from hospital, after a move to a town where nobody is known, after caring for someone who has died.
Befriending commitments are lighter and often longer than mentoring commitments. An hour a week or an hour a fortnight is typical for face-to-face befriending; a telephone befriending call usually runs 20 to 45 minutes, weekly. Matches commonly run 6 to 12 months, and with older people they are frequently open-ended.
The one difference that matters
The one difference that matters is testable in a single question: can you name what this person is trying to reach? If the answer is yes, and the person agrees it is their goal rather than a professional’s goal for them, the need is mentoring. If the answer is no, and what is actually missing is other people, the need is befriending.
Getting it the wrong way round is not a neutral mistake. A lonely older woman referred into a goal-shaped programme is set homework she never asked for. A seventeen-year-old with a specific hurdle who is given a weekly chat is quietly told that nobody expects anything of him.
The volunteer
- Knows, before the first meeting, whether this match has a goal or is the goal.
- Keeps to the agreed contact pattern rather than the pattern that suits the week.
- Reports concerns to the coordinator the same day, and does not carry them alone.
The person supported
- Is told in plain words what the volunteer is and is not there to do.
- Can say the match is not working, without losing the service behind it.
- Is told at the start roughly how long the match is expected to last.
The scheme writes the purpose of each match down before it makes the match, tells both people the same thing about it, and reviews it rather than assuming it held. Where purpose is not recorded, the scheme cannot supervise the match, cannot evaluate it and cannot defend it if something goes wrong.
The neighbouring practices, mapped
Neighbouring practices share the one-to-one shape and differ in purpose, agenda and regulation.
| Practice | What it is for | Who sets the agenda | Typical length |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mentoring | A named goal outside the relationship | Mentee, guided by the mentor | 12 months in youth schemes |
| Befriending | The relationship itself | Nobody, by design | 6 to 12 months, often open-ended |
| Peer mentoring | A goal, between people of similar standing | Both, jointly | A term or an academic year, against a 12-month expectation in referred youth mentoring |
| Buddying | Getting through a specific transition | The task | Weeks to a few months |
| Coaching | Performance in a defined domain | Coachee, held to it by the coach | A fixed number of sessions |
| Counselling | Psychological distress | A clinical contract | Set by the therapy |
| Advocacy | Getting a person’s own view heard | The person, strictly | The length of the issue |
Neither mentoring nor befriending is a regulated profession. There is no professional regulator, no register and no protected title. What is regulated is the safeguarding around them: criminal record checking, data protection under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, and the duties a school or a local authority already carries.
Regulated activity is a separate and much narrower legal term, and it is not decided by the label on the scheme. Whether a particular role is regulated activity depends on what the volunteer actually does, with whom and how often, and that is what sets the level of criminal record check the role is eligible for. Weekly one-to-one mentoring of a child is ordinarily regulated activity, which is why such a role is eligible for an enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service check with children’s barred list information in England and Wales, for Protecting Vulnerable Groups scheme membership through Disclosure Scotland in Scotland, and for the equivalent AccessNI check in Northern Ireland. It is a criminal offence for a barred person to do that work. From 1 September 2026 the Crime and Policing Act 2026 removes the supervision exemption, so in England a supervised volunteer doing this work frequently is in regulated activity too. The government guidance on that change states that it applies to England, and schemes in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland should check their own national position.
Mentoring and coaching are not the same thing
Mentoring and coaching share a purpose of the same shape, a named goal, and differ in the domain the goal sits in and in the contract that holds it. They differ most clearly in what the practitioner is assumed to know. A mentor brings experience of the mentee’s road and may say what they did on it. A coach brings a method and generally does not need to have travelled the road at all; the coach’s expertise is in questioning, not in the field. Coaching is usually bought, is usually a fixed number of sessions, and is contracted in writing. Volunteer mentoring is usually free to the mentee, runs far longer, and is contracted through a scheme rather than between two individuals. In workplaces the two words are used almost interchangeably and often describe the same conversation, which is why the useful test is the contract rather than the label on the programme.
What both of them actually cost
Both cost more than people expect, because the volunteer is the cheap part. A working range for an active match in the United Kingdom is £700 to £2,500 a year, and between 60% and 80% of that is coordination rather than the volunteering itself: recruitment, references, criminal record checks, training, matching, supervision, records and the closing of matches. Where a scheme sits in that range depends on how complex its referrals are, whether the coordinator is full-time, whether volunteers travel and how long matches are expected to run. The overhead is not waste. The overhead is the scheme, and a scheme without it is two strangers in a room with nobody watching.