Description
Mentoring involves one-to-one support for young people on an ongoing basis. It can help to maintain a young person’s motivation to learn and can prevent drop-out.
Why is this approach useful?
Mentoring involves one-to-one support for young people on an ongoing basis. It can help to maintain a young person’s motivation to learn and can prevent drop-out.
Why is it a quick win?
Involving citizens as volunteer mentors keeps costs down. This means that the available funding can be focused on the organising the initiative, including the recruitment of volunteers, disseminating of the programme to VET providers, companies, and learners, and matching mentors and learners. It is also important to foresee some ‘pocket money’ to cover volunteers’ expenses (transport, costs of activities to develop with learners).
The organisation of the initiative can be relatively quick if its scope is limited, for instance, a local initiative involving the students of one university as volunteers and learners from a small number of VET providers. Initiatives of a wider scope would require a higher budget and more time to be implemented (e.g. a national initiative involving senior citizens in the whole country).
How to make this approach successful?
A mentoring programme involving volunteers should include the following features:
- Screening of volunteers to make sure they are suited to become mentors, and to ensure the safeguarding of the young people involved.
- Short training course for volunteers on their role as mentors.
- Support to mentors and learners, if they have questions about the programme or if problems arise.
- Mechanisms to ensure a good match between the learner and the mentor. This can be done by:
- coordinators doing a first match based on agreed criteria such as the distance between places of residence, and field of expertise
- the mentor and the learner having a first personal meeting after which they decide if they agree with the partnership proposed. If not, the coordinators of the initiative propose a different partner.
It is also useful to organise meetings where groups of mentors can exchange experiences.