Matching a mentor and a mentee
Mentoring in the United Kingdom takes five common forms, and the matching decision looks different in each: youth mentoring of a referred child, peer mentoring between pupils or students, workplace and alumni mentoring of the kind most large universities and professional bodies run, reverse mentoring where a junior colleague mentors a senior one, and befriending, which is mentoring’s quieter relative and has no goal at all.
The coordinator with a trained volunteer on one side and a referred person on the other, who has to decide this week whether to put them together.
The right of both people to refuse. A match is the only stage where two individuals are joined by somebody else’s judgement, and consent is the thing most easily lost in the arithmetic.
Matching becomes queue management. The next volunteer gets the next referral because both have waited, the pair are told they are a good fit, and the scheme learns in month three that neither of them wanted to say no to a coordinator who had clearly worked hard on it.
What all five share is that the relationship is created by a third party, which makes matching the decision a scheme most needs to get right and the one it is least often held to account for.
What to match on, and what to ignore
Match on what determines whether the pair can meet and can spend an hour together, and ignore what makes the match look good on a form. The right-hand column below is the one that saves schemes from themselves.
| Match on this | Ignore this |
|---|---|
| Practical availability: the same day and time, week after week | Enthusiasm used as a substitute for availability |
| Geography and travel: can they get there in all weather, all year | A volunteer’s willingness to drive further than is sustainable |
| A shared activity to build the hour around, such as walking, football, cooking or a crossword | Shared “interests” listed on a form and never tested |
| Language, and whether an interpreter would sit inside a private relationship | Assumed cultural knowledge based on a surname |
| The person’s own stated preference, including about the sex of the person visiting | The coordinator’s view that the preference is unnecessary |
| The volunteer’s demonstrated tolerance for this difficulty, such as dementia, self-harm or silence | General niceness, and length of service in the scheme |
| Risk factors from the referral and from screening, read together | A hunch about chemistry, and personality questionnaires |
Demographic similarity needs a sentence of its own, because it is where good intentions do the quietest damage. Matching on ethnicity, faith or background is right when the person has asked for it and weak as a rule imposed on them: evidence that demographic matching improves youth mentoring outcomes is thin, while evidence that match length and programme practice matter is not. Ask the person, and let the answer outrank the policy.
Who decides, and how both people get a real choice
The coordinator decides the match and nobody else does. Volunteers do not select from a list of referred people, referrers do not allocate, and funders do not influence it, because the alternative is a scheme in which an adult can steer themselves towards a particular child. Choice is then given to both people in a way that makes refusal easy rather than merely possible.
- Describe the proposed match to each person separately, saying what the other is like to spend an hour with rather than reciting their occupation.
- Say explicitly, to both, that saying no changes nothing about the service they receive and needs no reason.
- Leave a day before asking for an answer, so neither is agreeing to a coordinator’s face.
- Offer an alternative if either declines, and record the decline without a judgement attached.
- Confirm in writing to both: the dose, the duration, the end date, and who to contact if something feels wrong.
A volunteer lobbies for a particular person, or refuses every alternative
The volunteer is not matched with that person, and the coordinator treats the lobbying as information rather than preference. Record what was asked for and when, discuss it in supervision with a second member of staff or a trustee present, and revisit the screening decision rather than the matching one. Persistent steering towards a named individual, an age or a sex, combined with resistance to supervision, is a recognised grooming pattern, and a scheme that accommodates it once has taught the volunteer that the rule bends.
The first meeting
To run the first meeting well, keep it short, supervised and low stakes. The coordinator is present at the introduction, in a neutral place such as a school office, a community centre or the referring service, and stays long enough for a proper introduction before leaving the pair a limited time on their own.
Six things happen, in this order: the coordinator introduces both people and says what the scheme is for; the volunteer says what they will and will not do; the duration and end date are said out loud in the hearing of the person supported, not only in a letter; the pair agree what the next hour will consist of; both are told who to contact; and the coordinator arranges a separate check-in with each within the fortnight. Set the second meeting before the first one ends, because the gap after an introduction is where matches die.
How long the relationship should last, and how it ends
A youth mentoring relationship should last 12 months, and that is the ask for a hard reason rather than a conventional one: matches ending before three months are associated with outcomes worse than no match at all, published by Grossman and Rhodes in 2002. A befriending relationship commonly runs 6 to 12 months and is often open-ended for an older person, which replaces the end date with a scheduled review both people know is coming. Workplace and alumni mentoring usually runs a shorter fixed cycle, because the mentee arrives with an objective and leaves when it is met.
Ending a mentoring relationship well is a matched pair of conversations rather than an event. Name the final date at least a month ahead, hold a last session marked in some way the person chooses, then debrief each separately: the volunteer needs somewhere to put the loss, and the person supported needs to hear that the ending was always the plan and is not about them. Record the close, its reason and its date, and hold that record for the period the scheme has written down, commonly 6 years after a match closes.
Getting more out of a match is mostly a matter of protecting the boring parts: same day, same time, same place, and a coordinator who rings before there is a problem. Novelty does not deepen these relationships. Repetition does.
The mentor or befriender
- Accepts or declines the match proposed, and does not request a specific person
- Turns up on the agreed day, and says before missing one rather than after
- Lets the relationship be what the other person wants it to be, within the scheme’s boundaries
- Raises a match that is not working in supervision at week six, not month six
The young person or the person visited
- Can refuse the proposed match, and end it later, without a reason and without losing the service
- Is told at the first meeting how long it runs and when it ends
- Is asked what they want the hour used for, and asked again after a few months
- Has a named person to contact who is not the volunteer
The scheme makes the match and owns the consequences. It supervises both sides on a stated schedule rather than on request, reviews every match against the purpose it was made for, and unmakes a match that is not working instead of waiting for one of the two people to fail at ending it. A scheme that has never rematched anybody is not a scheme with perfect judgement, it is a scheme that is not looking.