When it does harm
Mentoring has one clear advantage and one well evidenced disadvantage.
A coordinator designing a scheme or deciding whether to accept a short grant, and a volunteer who wants to know the worst realistic outcome of their involvement.
The young person or adult who cannot stop a relationship being ended. They carry the whole cost of a badly designed match and have no say in the design.
A scheme treats every match as a bonus, so a collapsed match is written off as neutral. It is not neutral. The evidence says it can be worse than never starting.
The advantage is a small but real average benefit, around 0.2 of a standard deviation in meta-analysis of youth mentoring by DuBois and colleagues in 2011. The disadvantage is that a match which starts and then ends before three months is associated with outcomes worse than no match at all, reported by Grossman and Rhodes in 2002. That asymmetry is the argument of this page: the upside is modest and diffuse, the downside is concentrated on one child, and a scheme controls which one it produces.
The short match, and why it is the disadvantage that matters
The short match is the disadvantage that matters because it inverts the intervention. Young people are referred to mentoring because something in their life is unreliable, and the mechanism by which mentoring helps is a reliable adult who keeps turning up. A match that runs eight weeks and stops does not deliver a small dose of that mechanism, it demonstrates the opposite proposition, with a person the young person had begun to trust. This is why the ask is twelve months, and why a scheme which cannot ask for a year should not be recruiting children into it. That is a commissioning problem more than a volunteering one: six week and one term mentoring interventions exist because grants are six weeks and one term long, and accepting that money is the design decision most likely to do harm.
The volunteer who disappears at month four
The volunteer who disappears at month four is the most common failure in one to one schemes, and it rarely looks like a decision. It looks like a cancelled session, then a rearranged one, then a longer gap, then no reply. Nobody resigns. The young person is left to work out what happened and, in the absence of an explanation, will supply one about themselves. Four causes account for most of it, and each has a countermeasure a scheme can build in before the first match is made.
- Recruiting on enthusiasm rather than availability, prevented by asking a volunteer to describe a realistic year rather than a good intention.
- Training that ends before the match begins, prevented by scheduling supervision from month one rather than at the first crisis.
- Caseloads too high for anyone to notice a drift, prevented by holding a full time coordinator to roughly 30 to 50 active matches, fewer where referrals are complex.
- Treating an ending as an administrative event, prevented by writing a closing session into the match agreement at the start.
A volunteer stops replying and two sessions have been missed
The coordinator contacts the parent, carer or referrer within days, tells the young person plainly that this is not about them, and does not wait to see whether the volunteer resurfaces. The volunteer is contacted separately and offered a proper exit, including a final session if they can manage one. A silent lapse becomes an unexplained abandonment within weeks, and the difference is the coordinator’s phone call.
Dependency, and the harm particular to befriending
Dependency is the characteristic harm in befriending, and it is produced by kindness rather than neglect. A befriender visiting someone who sees almost nobody becomes, over months, the fixed point of the week. Two things follow. The befriender absorbs tasks outside the role, such as shopping, prescriptions or personal care, because the need is in front of them. The person visited stops using contacts they still had, because the visit covers the gap. The match now looks like a success and has quietly narrowed the person’s network. The second harm is the ending: a befriending match commonly runs six to twelve months and is often open ended for older people, so closing it can remove the most significant relationship in someone’s week, at no notice, for reasons that have nothing to do with them. A scheme with no ending procedure has designed a bereavement.
Harm by wrong method: mentoring, coaching, tutoring and training
Harm also arrives when mentoring is used where a different method was needed, because the relationship then carries a job it was never shaped for. Mentoring, coaching, tutoring and training are not the same thing, and the commonest error in schools and workplaces is to call all four mentoring.
| Method | Right when | The harm when it is the wrong choice |
|---|---|---|
| Mentoring | A reliable relationship over time | 12 months of goodwill spent on a problem a tutor could solve in a term |
| Coaching | A defined goal in a short window | Someone is coached towards a target while the reason they cannot reach it goes unaddressed |
| Tutoring | A specific subject or skill gap | A young person is befriended when they needed teaching, and falls further behind |
| Training | Knowledge the person lacks | Training delivered as a friendship is measured, correctly, as a poor course |
| Peer mentoring | Similar standing is the point | An untrained peer holds a disclosure they are not equipped to carry |
Befriending belongs here by absence: it has no goal at all, which is its strength for a lonely adult and its failure mode for a referred young person who needed something to change.
Both sides of the same intervention
The query that brings most people to this page asks for advantages and disadvantages, and the honest answer is that mentoring and befriending have both, in the same programme, decided largely by how the scheme is run rather than by whether mentoring is a good idea.
- Produces a small but real average benefit for young people, around 0.2 of a standard deviation, when matches run to length.
- Reduces how lonely someone feels, modestly, which is the outcome befriending is funded for.
- Reaches people no service reaches, because an hour of ordinary company is not a service anyone else offers.
- Costs a bounded amount per match per year, which a scheme can state in advance.
- Matches that end before three months are associated with outcomes worse than no match at all.
- Dependency, where the scheme becomes the only relationship and the ending removes it.
- Drift into practical care and other work the volunteer is neither trained nor insured for.
- Most of the cost is coordination, so a scheme that underfunds the coordinator is buying the risks without the benefits.
Every one of these is a design fault, so design them out
Every harm on this page is produced by scheme design rather than by bad volunteers, which is the reason to write it down. Six decisions remove most of the risk, and all are made before recruitment opens: ask for twelve months and refuse funding that cannot support it, screen with references and the correct check for the nation, train before the first meeting, supervise monthly, cap caseloads, and write the ending into the agreement on day one. Coordination is 60% to 80% of the cost of a match, a working range rather than survey data, whose width comes from how complex the referrals are, whether the coordinator is full-time, whether volunteers travel and how long matches are expected to run, and it is precisely the part that prevents harm.
Screening is nation specific, and getting it wrong is its own harm. England and Wales use a DBS check through the Disclosure and Barring Service, Scotland uses PVG scheme membership through Disclosure Scotland for regulated roles with children or protected adults, and Northern Ireland uses an AccessNI check. Records of a safeguarding concern involving a child are kept for decades rather than years: the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse recommended retention for 75 years, and a scheme should assume that long period applies.
The mentor or befriender
- Refuses the match at the outset if the agreed period is not realistic.
- Says when the commitment is slipping, at the point it slips.
- Stays inside the role, and hands care tasks, money, medication and disclosures straight to the coordinator.
The young person or the person visited
- Is told how long the match should last, and told when that changes.
- Is given a reason for an ending that does not leave them to invent one.
- Is told who else they can contact, so the scheme is not the only door.
The scheme is the only party that can prevent any of this, so it holds the duty. It decides whether to take money that funds a match shorter than the evidence supports, whether a coordinator has few enough matches to notice a drift at week three rather than month four, and whether every match has a written ending before it has a beginning. Reporting matches made without matches survived does not measure the thing that decides whether a scheme helped or harmed.