Working Paper 13/314 - abstract

Aspiration & Inspiration - A pilot study of mentoring in schools (PDF, 590kB)

Michael Sanders, Ariella Kristal, Farooq Sabri and Alex Tupper

We report the results of a pilot study to test the impact of a short talk on pupils' stated intentions to attend university. In this study, conducted over a single day in a single school, we test first the effect of mentoring vs no mentoring, and a variation in the form of the mentoring. We find increases in stated likelihood of applying to both university in general (0.8s.d.) and the University of Bristol particularly (0.0s.d.). We find no impact of varying the length of the talk.