Ending well
Ending a mentoring or befriending relationship well means naming the end date at the beginning, giving it a run-up of several weeks, holding a last session that is named as the last session, and settling in advance what happens to contact afterwards. A mentoring relationship is a bounded, one to one relationship between a volunteer and a person referred to a scheme, held for an agreed purpose, supervised by somebody else, and designed from the first day to end.
A coordinator planning the close of a match, and a volunteer who has realised they will have to say goodbye to somebody who has come to expect them. It is also for a family who want to know what happens when the visits stop.
Everything the match achieved. An ending done properly is the part of the intervention that lets the person keep the gain; an ending done badly can take the gain back and add a loss on top of it.
The person supported concludes that they were a case, not a friendship, and that the adult left like the others did. Endings are the stage schemes handle worst, because every other stage has a form attached to it and this one only has a conversation.
The boundary and the ending are what separate it from a friendship, and they are not the disappointing part of the model. A relationship that is honest about finishing is one the person supported can trust, because they are told the shape of it before they invest in it.
The ending is where that promise is either kept or broken. Youth mentoring matches that broke down before three months were associated with outcomes worse than no match at all, in the analysis by Grossman and Rhodes published in 2002, which is the strongest evidence in the field that a poor ending is not a neutral event. It is also the reason the ask for youth mentoring is twelve months. A scheme that cannot ask a volunteer for a year should not be recruiting children into it.
How long a mentoring relationship should last, and why the number matters
A mentoring relationship should last twelve months as a minimum ask where the person supported is a young person, and befriending matches commonly run six to twelve months, often open-ended where the person is older and living alone. The dose is modest and steady rather than intensive: about an hour a week for mentoring, an hour a week or an hour a fortnight for befriending, and twenty to forty-five minutes weekly for a telephone befriending call.
The length is not sentimentality about long relationships. It is that the change a scheme is trying to produce, a young person’s sense that an adult is reliable, or an older person’s re-entry into contact with the world, is produced by repetition rather than by intensity. Twelve short, unremarkable sessions do more than three long meaningful ones. That is also why the ending has to be built into the schedule rather than triggered by the funding running out.
The planned ending, and the notice period
A planned ending starts long before the last session. The end date is named at the beginning, repeated in the middle, and then given a run-up of several weeks so that it stops being an announcement and becomes something the pair work towards together. A run-up of six to eight weeks suits a year-long mentoring match, and where a scheme sits in that depends on how long the match has run, how much the person relies on it, and how much difficulty they have had with endings before.
Three things happen during that run-up:
- Review what has changed since the first session, out loud, with the person supported doing most of the talking.
- Transfer what the volunteer was providing to something that outlasts them, such as a group, a club, a neighbour, a social prescribing link worker, or a family member who has been out of contact.
- Decide together what happens to contact afterwards, and write the decision down before the last session rather than improvising it in the doorway.
Endings that are not on the calendar arrive anyway, because funding cycles end, volunteers move and referrals lapse. A scheme with a notice period as policy converts most of those into planned endings. A scheme without one converts them into the ending nobody wanted.
The last session
The last session is short, ordinary and explicit, and it is not a party. Three elements make it work. It is named as the last session at the start of the hour rather than at the end. It includes something that marks the time spent, such as a card, a photograph of a place they went, or a short written note from the volunteer that the person can keep. And it ends with the volunteer saying plainly what will happen next, including that they will not be visiting again, because a vague “I’ll see you around” leaves the person waiting.
What the volunteer must not do in that hour is make a private promise. “I’ll still ring you” is the most common and the most damaging, because it is offered kindly, is not kept, and turns a completed relationship into an abandonment that arrives three weeks later.
A match has to end suddenly, with no notice available
The volunteer, if they are able to, records or writes a short message explaining that the ending is not the person’s fault and is not about anything they did. The coordinator delivers the news in person or by voice rather than by letter, on the day the decision is made, and stays with the person for the conversation instead of dropping the fact and leaving. The scheme then offers a bridging contact, usually the coordinator themselves for a few weeks, and does not fill the gap with an immediate replacement volunteer. An abrupt ending is the exact circumstance the harm evidence describes. An unplanned ending does its damage through how it is handled rather than through the fact of it, and the handling that matters is the handling that happens immediately.
Contact after the match closes
Contact after a match closes is a scheme decision, made in advance and written into the volunteer agreement, not a private arrangement between two people who like each other. Schemes take one of three positions, and each is defensible as long as the position is stated before the last session rather than after it.
| Position | What it means | Where it fits |
|---|---|---|
| Clean close | No contact after the final session, and the scheme says so from the start | Matches with children and young people, and any match where dependency was a feature |
| Staged step-down | Contact reduces to a call at one month and one at three months, then stops | Long befriending matches with an older person living alone |
| Released to friendship | The scheme formally closes and the two people continue privately, with no scheme role | Adult to adult befriending only, where both have capacity and both freely choose it |
The last of those needs saying carefully. Once a match is released, the scheme is no longer supervising, no longer insuring and no longer able to act on a concern, and both people are told that in plain words. A scheme cannot hold a safeguarding responsibility for a relationship it has stopped overseeing, and pretending otherwise is worse than a clean close.
Endings a scheme does not choose
Some endings are not planned and not failures. In befriending with older people, matches end in hospital admission, a move into residential care, and death, and a coordinator who has never thought about that in advance will handle the first one badly. Three practical points: the volunteer needs to be told promptly rather than turning up to an empty house, the volunteer needs somewhere to take the loss, since they have lost someone real and are not entitled to grieve publicly, and the scheme needs a decision about whether the volunteer attends a funeral, made case by case with the family rather than by policy.
The volunteer
- Gives notice through the scheme, not to the person supported first.
- Attends the final session, including when the match ended badly.
- Makes no private promise about staying in touch.
- Returns keys, records and any scheme phone, and deletes personal copies of anything about the person.
The person supported
- Is told the end date well before it arrives, and told again as it approaches.
- Is told the real reason the match is ending, in language they can use.
- Keeps a named contact at the scheme after the volunteer has gone.
- Can end the match early, at any point, without explaining and without losing anything else.
The scheme puts the ending on the calendar at the point of matching, holds a closing conversation with both people separately, records the outcome, and treats an unplanned ending as an incident to be reviewed rather than as ordinary attrition. It also budgets for the ending: closing a match properly takes coordinator time, and coordination is 60% to 80% of what a match costs to run. That band is a working range rather than survey data, and its 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.