Scottish study contributes to mentoring debate regarding vulnerable young people

The research follows a recent commitment by the Scottish Executive to the development of youth mentoring programmes, reflecting an increasingly important role for mentoring within UK youth policy.

The researchers interviewed young people and their mentors in three contrasting schemes: a project for young homeless people and an education project for young people excluded from school, both in Moray, and a befriending scheme in Dundee. The befriending scheme used volunteers, who were matched, one-to-one, with a young person, whilst the other schemes used paid keyworkers who worked on both an individual and a group basis.

The study showed that:

• Most young people found mentoring to be a positive experience, contributing to their confidence, skills and development.
• Young people particularly valued mentors who shared similar social backgrounds and were willing to discuss their experiences.
• The ‘ability to have a laugh’ with a mentor was often crucial to developing and sustaining the relationship.
• Young people often attributed improved family relationships to their experience of mentoring.
• Mentoring could provide a starting point for young people to consider their own skills in supporting others - inspiring them to become mentors or work with young people themselves.
• The ending of the mentoring relationship had the potential to undermine any benefits gained from the process and could leave the young person feeling rejected. Young people welcomed opportunities to keep in touch informally with their mentors. 

Mentors found the mentoring process to be an opportunity to work with rather than on young people, and a way of developing a young person’s untapped potential. But they pointed to the negative effects that peer groups could have on their charges and often had to develop strategies to deal with this issue.

Kate Philip, a senior research fellow at Aberdeen University and co-author of the report, said: “Our findings show that mentoring experiences can be very powerful for young people. But planned mentoring is often a risky business fraught with challenges. Many young people described mentoring as a form of friendship and as ‘different’. Trying to ‘prescribe’ mentoring by making it fit into pre-defined timescales and frameworks may be counter-productive. Planned mentoring that allows for real choice and negotiation may have more value in the long term.”