The Centre for Policy Studies has published a report concluding that the benefits of mentoring are exaggerated and unproven. It seems that the Prince's Trust and I disagree!
It seems that the Centre for Policy Studies does not think that there is enough evidence to prove the case for mentors, particularly children and young adults. Well, au contraire say I and the Prince's Trust and from totally different bases too.
I have recently been involved in a number of evaluations of projects funded by the European Social Fund - the 2000 to 2006 monies have been spent and now need to be accounted for. Those evaluations have been in the West Midlands and in the South West regions - quite different areas with quite different problems, yet both demonstrated benefits of having mentoring support, particularly for vulnerable people.
The projects ranged from support for ex-offenders and really hard to reach young people and encouraging them into learning or employment, encouraging the work-less back into employment, to helping people with mental health issues into learning and employment. In all cases, the one to one mentoring gave the beneficiary (technical term for the person having the project done to them) the extra support they needed to face up to and overcome barriers, real or perceived, to learning or employment.
The mentor support included all sorts of things from the relatively mundane provision of bus travel tokens and assistance in completing application forms, through exploring an individual's career history to identify transferable skills, through helping young gang members to cross postcode boundaries, to providing the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and helping young people in particular identify what is unacceptable as well.
Those mentors that I met were special people as well. They could fearlessly work with those that I would run away from. They could encourage, empathise with and support people with very different backgrounds to their own. They could inspire some of the most lost people in society to reconnect with the world around them. They could inspire friendship and companionship with and among people with no real knowledge of how to relate to those around them appropriately. And at the end of the day, the mentors could go home and lead a normal family life, and not be hounded with the sorts of self-doubt and worries that I for one would have after an intense day.
If, for example, just one or five of the several hundred young people in one of the West Midlands projects went on to get a job, and didn't commit any more crime, the substantial funds put into that project would have had a positive payback. The cost of supporting someone on benefits or in prison for a substantial amount of time, plus the insurance costs, the social costs, the human cost to the victims of crime would outweigh the cost of that project. In fact nearly 50 people gained jobs, and many more were living crime free existences at the end of the project.
To me, that payback is priceless, and I am a fervent supporter of mentoring programmes. I suspect that my ESF funded projects evaluations would not cross the Centre for Policy Studies radar however, so they will never see the value.
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