Where mentoring and befriending are used
Mentoring and befriending run in six main settings in the UK: youth mentoring with referred young people, mentoring inside schools and colleges, befriending older people, mentoring at work, befriending on a health referral through social prescribing, and support for refugees and new arrivals.
A coordinator deciding which model fits their field, and a volunteer or family trying to work out which kind of scheme they are actually dealing with.
It stops one setting’s rules being imported wholesale into another, which is the most common way a well run scheme goes wrong in its second year.
A home visiting service run on school rules never assesses the home. A school scheme run on befriending rules never plans an ending. Both look fine on paper for about a year.
The relationship is nearly the same in all six: one person gives time to another, one to one, on a repeating pattern, with a scheme standing behind the pair. What differs is the machinery around it, and the machinery is what a coordinator has to build.
The six settings, and the four things that change between them
Six settings cover almost all organised one-to-one mentoring and befriending in this country, and four things change between them: who refers, how long the match runs, which risk dominates, and who pays. Read the table across a row, because the row is the scheme you would have to run.
| Setting | Who refers | Typical length | Dominant risk | Who pays |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Young people | School, children’s services, youth offending team, parent | 12 months, minimum | The match ending early | Charitable trusts, local authority contracts |
| Schools and colleges | The school, through pastoral staff, and the school itself for a teacher in statutory induction | One academic year for peer mentoring, ongoing and reviewed for a learning mentor, the statutory induction period for an early career teacher | A pupil disclosing to another pupil | The school or college budget |
| Older people | Adult social care, GP practice, family, or the person themselves | 6 to 12 months, often open ended | Drift into unpaid care work | Charity fundraising, local authority, health commissioning |
| Workplace | The employer, human resources, or self nomination | One employer cycle | Confidentiality against line management | The employer |
| Health and social prescribing | A GP practice or a link worker | 6 to 12 months | Needs above what a volunteer can hold | NHS commissioning, public health |
| Refugees and new arrivals | Resettlement team, local authority, sponsor group | 12 months for community sponsorship, 6 to 12 months for integration befriending | Straying into immigration advice | The sponsor group’s own fundraising for community sponsorship; charity and local authority funding for integration befriending |
Every band here is a working range, not survey data: no UK body publishes a cost index or an outcome benchmark for this work. The width comes from how complex the referrals are, whether the coordinator is full time, whether volunteers travel, and how long matches run.
Who refers, and why that decides everything else
Who refers decides three things at once: whether the person chose to be there, what the scheme knows before the first meeting, and who the coordinator escalates to. A referred fourteen year old did not ask for a mentor, and their real answer to the idea appears in month four rather than at the assessment. An eighty two year old who telephoned a befriending service herself has already done the hardest part. A health referral arrives with a reason, a children’s services referral arrives with a plan the scheme is a small part of, and a self referral arrives with nothing, which means the scheme’s own assessment is the only one there will be.
How long the match runs, and the one duration rule the field turns on
Match length is not an administrative preference, it is the variable that decides whether a scheme helps or harms. Youth mentoring matches that end before three months are associated with outcomes worse than no match at all, published by Grossman and Rhodes in 2002 and still the most important result in the field. A young person who has already been let down does not read an early ending as a scheduling problem. That is why 12 months is the standard ask, and it is the ask for a reason.
Befriending runs to a different clock: an hour a week or an hour a fortnight, telephone calls of 20 to 45 minutes weekly, and matches commonly lasting 6 to 12 months, often open ended where the isolation is not going to resolve. Workplace mentoring runs to whatever cycle the employer sets and ends on a date everyone knew from the start, which is the one thing the workplace does better than every other setting.
A scheme cannot honestly promise a young person a year
Do not open the match. The coordinator holds the referral and tells the referrer plainly that the funding or the volunteer supply will not support twelve months. A six week mentoring block for a referred child is not a smaller version of good practice, it is the version the evidence warns against.
Which risk dominates, and how it changes by setting
The dominant risk changes by setting even though the safeguarding framework does not. In youth mentoring it is the ending. In older people’s befriending it is drift: the visit that quietly becomes shopping, then medication collection, then personal care, at which point a volunteer is doing regulated activity, or regulated work in Scotland, with no training and no insurance behind it. In schools it is a pupil disclosing to another pupil. At work it is the mentor asked, six months in, for an opinion in a promotion round. On a health referral it is needs above what a volunteer can hold. With refugees it is a well meaning volunteer answering a question about a Home Office letter, which is regulated advice a volunteer must never give.
Who pays, and what the money actually buys
Funding sources differ by setting but the cost structure does not: an active match costs a scheme roughly £700 to £2,500 a year, all in. Light touch telephone befriending sits at the bottom, around £700 to £1,200. Youth mentoring with a referred young person sits at the top, around £1,500 to £2,500, because assessment, training and supervision are heavier. Between 60% and 80% of that money is coordination rather than the volunteering, and one full time coordinator can hold 30 to 50 active matches. Volunteers are not free labour. They are a delivery model with an overhead, and the overhead is the scheme.
What does not change in any setting
Four obligations hold everywhere on this page. The scheme checks its volunteers through the route for its nation: a DBS check in England and Wales, PVG scheme membership in Scotland, an AccessNI check in Northern Ireland. Checks are free of charge for volunteers who meet the DBS definition of a volunteer, though an umbrella body may charge its own admin fee, and the current fee position is published by those three bodies rather than here. The scheme supervises, through a named person with a rhythm for doing it. The scheme keeps records for a period it has written down and can justify, because UK GDPR sets no fixed retention period. And the scheme plans the ending before it plans the beginning.
The volunteer
- Turns up on the agreed pattern, because reliability is the intervention
- Stays inside the role the scheme described, and says so when asked to step outside it
- Reports a concern the same day, rather than deciding alone whether it is serious
The person supported
- Can ask what the volunteer is and is not there to do, and get a straight answer
- Can stop or change volunteer, without a reason and without losing other support
- Is told when the match will end, and told again before it does
The scheme carries what neither of them can: the check, the training, the insurance, the supervision, the record and the escalation route. A scheme that matched people without those has moved the risk onto two individuals who did not agree to carry it.
A volunteer is asked to do personal care, handle medication, or take money
The volunteer declines on the spot and tells the coordinator the same day. The coordinator treats the request as information: it usually means the person’s needs have changed since the referral, and the response is to go back to the referrer or to adult social care, not to quietly widen the role.