Mentoring training and courses
Mentor training in the UK comes in two forms and only one is compulsory: the induction a scheme runs for its own volunteers, which is free, required before your first meeting, and specific to the people you will meet, and a paid qualification in mentoring or coaching, which volunteer schemes here do not require and which is not normally accepted in place of a scheme’s own induction.
A volunteer deciding whether to buy a mentoring course before applying, and a coordinator deciding what induction has to contain.
Your money, and the scheme’s standards. Free induction is the training that keeps people safe; a paid certificate is a career asset, and confusing the two leaves a volunteer qualified on paper and untrained for the match.
Volunteers spend hundreds of pounds on a coaching qualification, then find it counts for nothing towards the induction they still have to sit. A scheme accepting a bought certificate instead has no record the volunteer was told its reporting route.
Buy the second for reasons of your own; you cannot volunteer without the first.
If your search results look wrong, they are, and you are not searching badly. Some of what the phrase returns is forklift truck and plant operator training, published by an unrelated commercial company whose name closely resembles the words you typed: legitimate training in lifting equipment, with no connection to mentoring, befriending or volunteering. Some of the rest is written for other countries, where the qualifications are not UK ones, and the word coaching pulls in executive programmes priced for employers rather than volunteers. Skip all three.
What scheme induction covers, and why it is free
Scheme induction covers the things that go wrong, and it is free because the scheme, not the volunteer, carries the duty to make sure it happened. It runs to one to three sessions before your first meeting. Nine subjects appear in every serious induction.
- Safeguarding, and what a concern looks like while it is still small.
- The reporting route: the named person, how to reach them, and the same-day deadline.
- Confidentiality and its limits, in the words you will use with the person you support.
- Boundaries: money, lifts, gifts, social media, your own number, physical contact.
- Lone working, including home visits and how the scheme knows where you are.
- Recording: what goes in a session log and how long it is kept.
- The relevant framework, such as the Children Act 1989 in England and Wales and Keeping Children Safe in Education for schools in England, or the Care Act 2014 for adults at risk in England, with separate legislation and statutory guidance in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
- Data protection under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018.
- Endings, the subject inductions most often omit.
Your criminal record check is part of joining, not training, and the scheme arranges it: a DBS check in England and Wales, PVG scheme membership in Scotland, or an AccessNI check in Northern Ireland. Checks are free of charge for volunteers meeting the DBS definition of a volunteer, though an umbrella body may charge the scheme an admin fee. No course substitutes for it.
Mentoring, coaching and training are three different activities
Mentoring, coaching and training get used as synonyms in course marketing, and they are not, which matters when deciding what you are buying.
| Activity | What it works on | Who sets the agenda | Typical length |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mentoring | A person, broadly, with the mentor’s experience as one resource | Mostly the mentee, loosely | 6 to 12 months, and 12 months for youth mentoring |
| Coaching | A defined goal, without the coach having done the job | Jointly, and written down | A set number of sessions |
| Training | A specified competence, delivered to a syllabus | The trainer or awarding body | Hours or days |
Befriending sits outside all three: no goal, no syllabus, no performance area, because the relationship is the intervention. That is why befriending induction spends its time on lone working, capacity and endings, and why a coaching qualification adds little to a befriender.
What a paid qualification adds, and when it is worth paying for
A paid qualification adds credibility with employers, a vocabulary for what you already do, and supervised practice hours, and it adds nothing to your suitability as a volunteer. Buy one in four situations and not otherwise.
- Buy it if you coordinate a scheme, or intend to, where a recognised qualification is used in recruitment.
- Buy it if you mentor inside a business and want the practice recognised in a paid role.
- Buy it if you intend to charge for coaching, where clients ask about an accrediting body’s route.
- Buy it if your learning has plateaued after a year of practice and supervision surfaces nothing new.
Check three things before paying. Ask who awards the certificate and whether that body is independent of the seller. Ask how many hours of supervised practice are included, because a course with no practice is a reading list with an invoice. Ask whether the syllabus covers UK safeguarding law, since most online and international programmes do not.
Free material that is not a course
Free material sits between induction and a qualification, and for most volunteers it is the right amount. Schemes publish their own volunteer handbooks, the most useful document you can read because it describes the match you are joining. Bodies such as NCVO publish volunteer management guidance. Books on youth mentoring practice are worth more than an online module, because the module is usually the book with a quiz attached.
Treat downloadable PDFs with ordinary suspicion. Check the country, check the year, and check whether the document names DBS, PVG and AccessNI separately, because a UK-facing text mentioning only DBS was written for England and Wales alone.
The volunteer
- Completes the scheme’s induction in full before meeting anyone.
- Says so when a topic was not understood, rather than signing the sheet.
- Attends refresher training when called, particularly on safeguarding.
- Treats a bought certificate as development, not proof of suitability.
The young person or person supported
- Meets a volunteer told the reporting route before the first session.
- Is not the training exercise for an untrained volunteer.
- Is told what the volunteer can and cannot keep to themselves.
- Benefits from training that covered endings.
The scheme owes both of them free induction before matching, delivered by the scheme itself, recorded against the volunteer’s file, and repeated when policy changes. It may not charge volunteers for it, accept a bought certificate in its place, or run it once the match has already started.
A scheme asks you to pay for its own induction, or has none
Stop the application and ask directly: what training do you provide, when, and does it happen before I meet anyone. A scheme with no induction cannot show an insurer or a safeguarding review that you were told its reporting route, which puts the risk on you as well as on the person you support. The coordinator must run it, record it, and fund it.