Mentoring
Student mentors are current university students who work on a one-to-one basis with young people (mentees) in local secondary schools over a sustained period. The aims of the mentoring relationship are:
- to raise aspirations;
- to raise achievement;
- to help young people overcome personal barriers to learning;
- to offer a positive role model;
- to encourage and support young people.
A mentor is a 'professional friend' who can talk with a young person in confidence about a wide range of things. A mentor is not a counsellor, a careers expert or a teacher, although the role may touch on any of these. All mentors undergo a rigorous recruitment and selection procedure, including an Enhanced Criminal Records Bureau check, and receive ongoing training for their role.
Each student mentor usually works with three young people, meeting each for around an hour a week at school for an informal chat about how things are going.
Mentor support may involve helping with coursework, homework or revision; listening to mentees talk about their lives; helping them to find solutions to their problems; encouraging them with their dreams and ambitions; and helping them to make realistic plans for their future. By sharing their own experiences, mentors also dispel preconceptions about university life and give their mentees an insight to a very different world from their own.
School students taking part in mentoring are usually members of the Year 10 Aimhigher cohort. These are young people with the potential to be successful in further and higher education but who come from groups under-represented in higher education.
Mentoring is of particular benefit to young people who have the potential to progress to higher education but are at risk of not achieving this due to factors relating to their school work or their personal lives or a combination of both. Often the students who gain most from mentoring are those predicted to gain C/D grades at GCSE but who have the potential to achieve higher grades.
Benefits for students can include increased confidence and self-esteem as well as improved organisational skills and application to study. Mentors share their own experiences and encourage young people to think about learning in a new way.
For more information, please contact the Mentoring and Tutoring Coordinator, Zoë Pither, email zoe.pither@bristol.ac.uk or telephone (0117) 331 7550.