The government, the Mentoring and Befriending Foundation (MBF) and individual mentoring organisations should stop claiming that mentoring is a panacea for disaffected youth, as there is no evidence base to support this claim. This was the conclusion of a new report from the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) 'Youth Mentoring: a good thing?'

While the report acknowledged that mentoring can work for some young people, for example when it replicates the role of a parent in providing consistent and continuous support, it said that there was no evidence to verify its efficacy for all young people, particularly the most disadvantaged. It also said that the government has given its blessing to mentoring schemes which are managed by staff with minimal training, who themselves are charged with managing substantial numbers of barely trained volunteers; a situation which is not appropriate for schemes working with particularly troubled youths.

In fact, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith announced at this year's Labour Party conference that an additional £3.8 million was to be provided for community groups in 10 target areas to divert teenagers from joining gangs. That money will be used, among other things, to fund mentoring schemes.

“Indeed our argument is really quite simple,” says CPS' editor, Tim Knox, “that volunteers are really not the best people to help turnaround the lives of deeply bashed up kids. And in many cases are unable to give the consistency and continuity that is needed in the situation. So this whole new edifice has been built on pretty shaky foundations.”

Steve Matthews, deputy chief executive of MBF, says that the CPS' report does contain some good recommendations, namely that there is indeed a need for more research – particularly long-term research – into the benefits of mentoring, and that more organisations should be working towards the standards MBF has set for programmes.

However, he does not agree with claims made about the benefits to individuals, and describes the report as unbalanced in terms of the information it presents, relying on unsubstantiated evidence and failing to take account of new research.

“Some of the research alluded to is quite old now, and there has been more recent research carried out which has found that mentoring can have a real benefit for the individuals that were involved in that project.”

One such report, funded by the DCSF and recently published by the Prince's Trust, 'Making the Case', argues in support of one-to-one mentoring as a means to reduce youth crime and reoffending.

"For young offenders, it provides positive role models they can grow to trust and believe in; for mentors, the positive impact on young people’s lives provides a real sense of worth, while for society at large it is one way of helping to reduce offending," the report said.

It went on to find that 65% of young offenders under the age of 25 said that having the support of a mentor would help them to stop re-offending.

However, Richard Meier, author of the CPS report, is highly critical of Making the Case saying: “I was quite shocked that that is being put forward as a serious piece of research.”

“If you do some survey research and you find that you've got 80% of young offenders saying that having a mentor would help them stop re-offending, that's a funny way to do research,” he says.

“It's like saying if you had £10,000 would it help you stop re-offending. Well yes it might but that's not evidence is it?” (The Prince's Trust was unavailable for comment).

“That's the basic thrust of my report. Lets look at what the evidence actually says, and provide services on the basis of that rather than what we think might work or should work or we want to work.”

Meier says that he is by no means arguing against mentoring. “High quality mentoring demonstrably does good. But to say that because it works in certain circumstances for certain groups of young people that you can then, without an evidence base, use it with ever more vulnerable groups, in a way I think you are introducing the idea that this is a panacea, because it works effectively in one scenario so we're going to roll it out in various other ones.”

“We've never said that mentoring is a panacea, it needs to be seen alongside other forms of intervention,” says MBF's Matthews, a view shared by Sue Gwaspari, director of part-time volunteering at CSV. "We would never claim that mentoring alone would provide a magic bullet, but our own feedback from troubled young people who are mentored by volunteers, is that a properly managed scheme can have tremendous benefits for them,” she says.

“They tell us that having a mentor has helped reduce their problems at school, improved their confidence and selfesteem and helped them improve relationships with their own family. Two-thirds say they feel happier from having had a mentor. These benefits are strengthened even more when young people are given responsibly to become volunteers themselves."

In fairness, this doesn't really contradict Meier's central premise that more research is needed and that “the rosy picture that is painted by a lot of policy makers and people in the mentoring sector needs to be questioned”.

Charity Times asked those policy makers, at the DCSF, to respond to claims made in the report, however they were more interested in discussing peer mentoring than specifics on the validity of youth mentoring, saying: “Research has shown that effective peer mentoring strategies must be well implemented and well supervised. Given the sensitive area involved it is essential that children are well trained, and that skilled adults are onhand to monitor the programme. The most successful peer mentoring schemes recruit pupils from a range of different backgrounds to take part and anecdotal evidence suggests that this has an overall positive effect in terms of creating a positive climate within the school.”

While more hard research is needed, that's not to say that the benefits of mentoring are completely unsubstantiated. Digging a bit into the annual reports of mentoring providers can, in fact, reveal some real success stories.

One example is the Greenwich & Lewisham Roots and Wings Mentoring Scheme, which has worked with young people in secondary education since 1994, brokering mentoring relationships between them and adult mentors from the business/working world.

“Taking part in the mentoring programme opens the eyes of each mentee involved and gives them knowledge and exposure to the working environment, not to mention work experience placements within our collaborating companies,” says business manager Nicola Roley.

“We have brokered over 1000 partnerships between student mentees and adult mentors, and have many mentees that are still very much in contact with them to date.”

Indeed, the organisation's annual report provides evidence of a significantly higher proportion of those young people who had gone through the programme entering higher education than those who had not, though if this is representational of the programme, or the make-up of the children taking advantage of it, is unclear.This again is why robust, longterm research into the benefits of mentoring is needed – to translate the positive experiences reported by mentoring providers into hard evidence.

“In a nutshell that's what we're trying to say,” says Meier. “And I think if I sat round a table with the MBF, I'm not sure we're actually from that different places. Although I have criticised them in the report, I think at heart we're probably trying to do a similar thing – they might not agree with that though.”

CPS Youth Mentoring Report recommendations

• Good mentoring can work for some specific groups of troubled young people. There is, however, no evidence that it works for all young people.

• The Government, the MBF and individual mentoring organisations should all therefore stop encouraging the delusion that mentoring is some kind of panacea for disaffected youth.

• Mentoring in the UK should be overhauled so that it is based on what has been shown to be effective. The current review of the APS should only be seen as the first step in such a process.

• The need to overhaul mentoring should not mean that a straitjacket is imposed on the voluntary sector: the variety and diversity of possible approaches which the voluntary sector is able to provide is a potential strength, not a weakness. But it does mean that mentoring should be recognised as a highly skilled, specific form of intervention for troubled youths. It should therefore be far more tightly focussed on those youths for whom it can work, more rigorously controlled and more carefully monitored. This will involve the MBF adopting the following recommendations. The MBF should: abandon the current Approved Provider Standard and replace it with a far more prescriptive and compulsory inspection scheme for those youth mentoring schemes which receive public funds;

• undertake a properly resourced control trial to ascertain for which groups of young people mentoring schemes can be effective; those groups for whom no evidence exists that mentoring works should no longer receive this intervention;

• replace its ‘Priority 1 – influencing national policy/practice’ with a commitment to help those whom mentoring schemes are expected to help;

• require all youth mentoring schemes to – at a minimum – make three attempts (via a personal visit, not merely a letter) to contact any mentee whose mentoring relationship has ended prematurely (for whatever reason) with a view to offering either alternative mentoring or further support from another organisation;

• ensure that all mentoring schemes offer frequent and consistent support to mentees. This is likely to involve, as a minimum, contact of two hours a week for at least one year;

• ensure that those applying for roles which involve the management of mentoring schemes, and supervision of mentors, have a qualification in, or professional experience of, a relevant subject such as counselling, group work/group facilitation or psychotherapy;

• ensure that all mentoring literature should explain the difficulties and stresses involved in being a mentor and the potentially harmful effects on young people of mentoring relationships that end prematurely;

• review the selection criteria for mentors so that only those with the necessary skills and character are able to become approved mentors. There are of course numerous reasons why some young people are more likely to have problems than others. Poverty, unemployment, poor housing and education and many other concerns can all play a part. But a common factor is that, all too often, there is a void in their lives caused by the absence, or the low quality, of parenting.

To some degree, and in some cases, mentoring may be able to help.This void cannot simply be filled, however, by poorly trained volunteers, who in turn are managed by inadequately trained supervisors

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