Mentoring young people
Youth mentoring is a one to one relationship between a trained adult volunteer and a young person, arranged by a scheme after a referral, running for about an hour a week and asking for a commitment of 12 months.
An adult thinking about volunteering as a youth mentor, and a coordinator who has to decide whether their scheme can honestly take a referral.
The young person’s expectation. Youth mentoring is the one setting where doing it briefly is worse than not doing it at all.
A scheme wins a one year grant, matches thirty children in month two, and closes the matches in month eleven when the money stops. On the funder’s report that is thirty young people supported. To the thirty it is another adult who left.
The volunteer is not a tutor, a therapist, a social worker or a substitute parent. What the volunteer supplies is time that is reliable, unconditional and not about the young person’s problems, which is rarer in a referred child’s week than any of the professional inputs around them.
Who gets referred, and what they were referred for
Referrals into youth mentoring arrive from four routes: a school’s pastoral or inclusion team, a local authority children’s services team, a youth offending or early help service, and occasionally a parent who has gone looking. The reason attached to the referral is usually behavioural or educational, because that is the language the referrer works in. The reason underneath it is almost always that the young person has too few adults.
Referral reasons cluster into a few patterns: a young person on the edge of exclusion, a young carer with no time of their own, a child in care moving placements, a young person whose attendance slipped after a bereavement, and a care leaver at seventeen with nobody to phone on a Sunday. Schemes taking referrals of autistic young people, or young people with a learning disability, need to change the matching and the ending rather than just the risk assessment, because predictability and a slow, announced goodbye matter more in those matches than the activity does.
What youth mentoring realistically achieves
The realistic aim is modest, and worth stating plainly because the field over-claims. Across the research literature the overall effect of youth mentoring is small, around 0.2 of a standard deviation, in the meta-analysis published by DuBois and colleagues in 2011. Small but real is the honest description. Transformative is not, and a scheme that promises transformation to a funder has written a cheque a volunteer will be asked to cash.
What moves that effect is not the mentoring, it is the programme practice around it: matching, training, supervision and match length. A well run scheme beats a badly run one by more than mentoring beats no mentoring at all. This site does not publish reoffending reductions, attainment gains or hospital admission figures attributed to mentoring, because the numbers in circulation for those do not survive scrutiny.
A realistic aim for a twelve month match sounds like this: the young person has one adult outside the family and outside the professional system who knows them, turns up, and did not leave.
The duration rule, and why three months is the dangerous number
Duration is the one variable a coordinator must not trade away. 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 finding in the field. The mechanism is not mysterious. A young person referred because adults have been unreliable is given another adult, and that adult stops coming.
The rule that follows is blunt: a mentoring scheme that cannot ask for a year should not be recruiting children into it. If the funding runs to six weeks, the honest options are a group activity, a piece of practical support with a defined end, or nothing, and nothing is a legitimate answer.
A mentor wants to end the match in the first three months
The mentor tells the coordinator before telling the young person, and does not simply stop replying. The coordinator then finds out whether this is fixable, and if it is not, runs a proper closing meeting with an explanation the young person can carry: that the adult’s circumstances changed, and that it was not about them. An unexplained disappearance in month two is the specific harm the evidence identifies.
How to become a youth mentor in the UK
To become a youth mentor, apply to a scheme rather than to a young person, and expect 6 to 12 weeks from application to first meeting. Almost all of that is references, checks and training, not administrative delay.
- Apply to a local scheme, a national charity or a school based programme, saying honestly how many hours you have and for how long.
- Attend an interview that is partly about motivation, because a scheme that does not ask why you want to spend time alone with a child is not a scheme to join.
- Supply references, usually two, which the scheme takes up and reads.
- Complete the criminal record check for your nation: a DBS check in England and Wales, PVG scheme membership in Scotland, an AccessNI check in Northern Ireland.
- Complete training covering safeguarding, boundaries, confidentiality and endings, which is the point at which some volunteers correctly decide this is not for them.
- Meet the young person for the first time with the coordinator present, on the scheme’s terms.
Never assume DBS covers the UK, because it does not. Checks are free of charge for volunteers who meet the DBS definition of a volunteer, though an umbrella body may still charge its own admin fee, and current fee positions are published by the DBS, Disclosure Scotland and AccessNI. Youth mentoring is unpaid: there is no salary, and reasonable expenses are reimbursed, with car use commonly reimbursed at the approved mileage rate published by HMRC, which you should check for the current figure.
What the mentor owes, and what the young person is owed
The mentor
- Turns up on the agreed day, every time, and gives notice when that is impossible
- Keeps the boundary the scheme set on contact channels, gifts, money and social media
- Reports a safeguarding concern the same day, without promising secrecy first
- Gives a month’s notice of ending, and attends the closing meeting
The young person
- Is told at the start how long the match should last, and told again before it ends
- Can say no to an activity, a topic, or the whole match, without losing other support
- Is told before the first meeting that a mentor cannot keep a secret about their safety
- Can ask what is written down after each session and who reads it
The scheme funds, checks, trains and supervises, and keeps records for a period it has written down. Session logs commonly run 6 years after a match closes, while anything relating to a safeguarding concern about a child is kept for decades, not years: the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse recommended 75 years, and schemes should assume the long period applies.
What a youth mentoring match costs to run
An active youth mentoring match costs a scheme roughly £1,500 to £2,500 a year, the top of the general band of £700 to £2,500, because a referred young person brings heavier assessment, longer training and closer supervision, and where a scheme sits in that range depends on how complex its referrals are, whether the coordinator is full time, and whether volunteers travel. One full time coordinator can hold 30 to 50 active matches, fewer where referrals are complex. That is the arithmetic that makes the duration rule and the funding question the same question: the twelve months has to be paid for before the first child is matched, not hoped for in month seven.