Mentoring

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Student mentoring links young people with an employer mentor. This is also commonly known as 'business' mentoring. A national survey in 2008 found 2,500 business mentors working in schools across England. Business mentoring can take various forms and usually involves regular meetings over a period of time spanning a school term to a year.

Business mentors can support students who are:

  • 'at risk', to develop their employability skills
  • working on enterprise or science and technology projects
  • studying for the new Diploma in a particular area of work.

Mentoring can involve building a one-to-one, face-to-face relationship with a student or working with a group of young people. Some programmes have developed online business mentoring or  online mentoring, where the relationship is via email exchanges or through a blog.

There is good evidence to show, that when done well, mentoring programmes help young people to do better in their school work and exams.

 

Benefits for employees

  • Sense of satisfaction in helping young people.
  • Improve work-related skills.
  • Develop better communication and interpersonal skills.
  • Build experience in enabling others to recognise and reach their potential (i.e. building good leadership skills).

 

Benefits for students

  • Opportunity to develop a trusting relationship with an adult from outside the formal education structure by regularly meeting with them.
  • Build their self-confidence.
  • The ability to appreciate the relevance of education to the world of work.
  • Opportunity to encounter a positive role model.

 

Employer involvement in student mentoring

Some large organisations have developed their own flagship student mentoring programmes. Employees, whatever the size of their company, have also become mentors to local schools through their local Education Business Partnership Organisation (EBPO). These can be found throughout England (although please note that that not all organise business mentoring schemes).

Elsewhere, schools and colleges sometimes organise their own mentoring scheme. For example, PricewaterhouseCoopers has supported the mentoring programme at Harris Academy in Southwark for several years.