Mentoring for Social Inclusion

A Critical Approach to Nurturing Mentor Relationships

Helen Colley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415311090
• eBook ISBN: 9781134387137
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

What does mentoring really mean? What can be achieved through mentor relationships? This timely book examines one of the fastest growing social movements of our time. As millions of volunteers worldwide continue to add to the mentoring phenomenon, the need for this authoritative text becomes increasingly evident. It capably traces the history of mentoring, unravelling the many myths that surround it, with a combination of intellectual rigour, insight and lucid discussions. The author draws upon detailed case studies, providing a unique and vivid account of mentoring through the voices of the participants themselves. These eye-opening narratives reveal the complex power dynamics of the mentor relationship, giving the reader the chance to: * Contextualise mentoring against the background policy driven schemes and social inequalities; * Look beyond the popular myths of self-sacrificing and devoted mentors, and understand the emotional cost of mentoring; * Appreciate young people's view of mentoring and recognise the benefits and the counterproductive outcomes it can produce; * Reflect on a range of models of mentoring, and consider policies to support good practice. The strength of this book lies in the author's ability to present complex material in a highly readable form. It offers a radically new theoretical analysis of mentoring, based on award-winning research, arguing that mentoring cannot be separated from the wider power relations that surround those involved. For anyone with a professional commitment or link to mentoring, including managers, practitioners and policy-makers, this is an essential, incomparable read.

Part I

The rise of the mentoring movement

Chapter 1

The emergence of engagement mentoring

Youth mentoring moves centre stage

Youth mentoring has expanded spectacularly over the past decade. By the early 1990s, tens of thousands of middle-class adults across North America were volunteering as mentors for poor urban youth through the programme Big Brothers Big Sisters – a mass movement which has come to represent a social and historical phenomenon in its own right (Freedman, 1999). By the mid-1990s, this movement had also begun to grow rapidly in the UK.

‘Industrial’ mentoring involved almost 17,000 pupils in hundreds of British schools, and encouraged thousands of companies to allow their business people to volunteer as mentors (Golden and Sims, 1997). From 1994 to 1998, the European Youthstart Initiative funded almost a hundred programmes of employment-related guidance, education and training for socially excluded young people in the UK, and the majority of these included mentoring. Within that Initiative, the Institute of Career Guidance (ICG) co-ordinated the Mentoring Action Project (MAP), the largest such programme in Britain to that date. Over a quarter of all statutory careers services in England and Wales took part in the MAP, which allocated mentors to 1,700 young people (Ford, 1999a). During the same period, the Dalston Youth Project, a voluntary sector scheme working with young black offenders in London’s deprived East End, became nationally lauded as an exemplar of mentoring for socially excluded youth (see Benioff, 1997). As similar projects proliferated, the National Mentoring Network (NMN) was established in 1994 to promote both local mentoring schemes and the development of a national infrastructure.

Miller (2002) traces the international expansion of youth mentoring in a number of advanced capitalist countries (mainly, although not exclusively, Anglophone) during the past five years. In the US alone, Big Brothers Big Sisters now boasts a quarter of a million volunteers. With presidential backing from George W. Bush, it is currently engaged in a five-year campaign to recruit 1 million more mentors to work with 14 million young people ‘at risk’. That model has been taken up in Canada and Australia, while Israel and Sweden have also seen the development of significant youth mentoring programmes. Undergraduate students have been a popular group for the recruitment of volunteer mentors (as in the New Beginnings scheme reported later in this book). The largest mentoring project in the US, GEAR-UP, is currently aiming to double the 750,000 undergraduate mentors it had in 2000, working with 16- to 19-year-olds at risk of disaffection. In Israel, 20 per cent of higher education (HE) students act as mentors to children in schools, and in Sweden a similar pattern is being followed. Although mentoring has not yet flourished to the same extent in other European countries, Miller suggests that there are more favourable cultural conditions and growing support for it in Ireland, Norway and the Netherlands.

Mentoring has also burgeoned massively in Britain since the New Labour government was elected in 1997. Labour’s policy-makers have shown enthusiastic support for mentoring as an intervention to promote social inclusion. The Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) (now renamed the Department for Education and Skills (DfES)) immediately began to provide the NMN with a Mentoring Bursary which has been substantially increased year on year. Soon after, the House of Commons Select Committee on Disaffected Children stated that all programmes seeking to address disaffection should include mentoring (House of Commons Education and Employment Committee, 1998). It has since been promoted by four different government departments, with responsibility for: education, training and employment; youth justice; health promotion; black, Asian and other minority ethnic communities; and social exclusion. In education, mentoring has become a standard ingredient in the recipe of almost every major new policy initiative, including prevention of school truancy and drop-out from PCET, responses to the report on the Stephen Lawrence inquiry which highlighted institutional racism, proposals to develop ‘gifted and talented’ children, and the Learning Gateway initiative to support labour market transitions for young people who have not succeeded at school (DfEE, 1999a–d).

By the start of 2003, the number of affiliates to the NMN has grown from an initial 350 to over 1,500 and is still rising. It has also attracted sponsorship from the McDonald’s fast food chain. One in three schools in Britain now offer mentoring to pupils, while one-third of NMN-affiliated programmes are in PCET contexts. Two major new government programmes represent the culmination of this trend: Excellence in Cities, aimed at improving the academic performance of children from disadvantaged communities in inner-city schools; and the Connexions service, a new national service which is replacing the former statutory careers services in England and incorporating youth services. Connexions’ aim is to provide multi-agency support for young people aged 13 to 19 through their transitions from adolescence to adulthood and from school to PCET and employment (DfEE, 2000a).

Britain follows the international trend of seeking volunteer mentors from the undergraduate student population. The National Mentoring Pilot Project was launched in 2001, linking twenty-one Education Action Zones (in deprived inner-city areas) to seventeen HE institutions, providing 800 undergraduate students to mentor 2,500 young people. Undergraduates have also been recruited as mentors by Excellence in Cities and by mentoring programmes organized through Millennium Volunteers and other local initiatives. The major programmes use paid mentors as well as volunteers. Excellence in Cities and Connexions have already employed 2,400 learning mentors in schools since 2000, and this is set to rise to 3,000 over the next two years. In addition, Connexions is seeking to recruit 20,000 personal advisers to work with 16- to 19-year-olds.

In January 2001, Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced a further £5.3 million from the Treasury as part of a £13 million funding package to develop youth mentoring over the next three years. Subsequently, the Home Office has provided more than £1.4 million to establish seven regional ‘Mentor Points’ in major cities to co-ordinate the recruitment and training of mentors for many of these projects. In addition, Connexions has its own large-scale training programme now underway. While Freedman (1999) characterized the initial rise of the mentoring movement in the US as ‘fervor without infrastructure’, these recent investments suggest that an infrastructure is indeed being put in place. However, the scale of funding remains small when the number of participants is taken into account. NMN figures indicate that over a million mentors may now be active in the UK. The government funding package, if it were to be allocated in just one year, would provide only around £14 per head. Although the successful and often-cited Dalston Youth Project estimated costs of around £2,000 per year to train and support an effective mentor, it appears that mentoring is regarded by policy-makers as a low-cost intervention.

For the most part, this fervour has carried all before it in a surge of celebration. Mentoring seems to encapsulate a ‘feel-good’ factor, typified in scenes at the NMN Conference and similar occasions: joyously tearful presentations of bouquets from mentees to mentors; or playlets where young people represent their mentors as angels, replete with halo and wings. Yet there is an irony in such a practice being sponsored so heavily by a government overtly committed to evidence-based practice and to the pursuit of ‘what works’. Reviews of research indicate that, despite its popularity, there is little evidence to support the use of mentoring on such a vast scale (Skinner and Fleming, 1999). While Ford’s evaluation of the MAP (1999a) shows that young people often perceived highly positive outcomes, he notes that the mentors in this programme were qualified and experienced careers advisers and youth workers. Moreover, they operated with young people willing to re-engage with formal education and training systems rather than with those who were deeply alienated from them.

There is alternative evidence that mentoring may be counterproductive to policy intentions for interventions with socially excluded young people (Colley, 2000b; Fitz-Gibbon, 2000; Philip and Hendry, 1996), and that even where young people are enthusiastic about their experience of being mentored, their mentors may not share this view (Colley, 2001a). Moreover, as we shall see in Chapter 2, it is a practice that remains ill-defined, poorly conceptualized and weakly theorized, leading to confusion in policy and practice. Before detailing the model of engagement mentoring that has emerged in recent years, this chapter continues by explaining how interest in mentoring young people for social inclusion first developed.

Early interest in mentoring youth for social inclusion

One of the earliest spotlights on mentoring for young people ‘at risk’ of social exclusion came from Werner and Smith’s extraordinary work Vulnerable But Invincible (1982). This reported a psychological study of young people from poor multi-ethnic communities in Hawaii throughout the first eighteen years of their lives. Their research identified twenty-one major risk factors which made young people vulnerable to maladaptive outcomes such as mental ill-health, criminal offending and long-term unemployment. These included chronic poverty, physical or learning disabilities, teenage pregnancy, serious accident or illness, and disruption of the family for various reasons. However, this vulnerability did not inevitably result in negative outcomes in a deterministic way. The researchers found that about two-thirds of the cohort studied, irrespective of the level of difficulties they faced, had the resilience to achieve successful, coping transitions to adulthood. This led Werner and Smith to emphasize the need to consider protective factors and positive attributes in young people, rather than the predominant focus on risk factors which, they argued, tended to pathologize disadvantage. Their findings identified one crucial and unexpected protective factor: resilient young people demonstrated an ability to seek out and gain support from informal mentors among their kin and community. Similar benefits from informal mentoring were observed elsewhere, for example, among teenage mothers in Latino communities in the US (Rhodes, 1994; Rhodes et al., 1992). However, while these findings about the importance of mentoring in these contexts were seized upon and much referenced in the subsequent literature, some important caveats they had raised were ignored in the ensuing fervour.

Garmezy, in his foreword to Vulnerable But Invincible, warned against a ‘false sense of security in erecting prevention models that are founded more on values than on facts’ (Garmezy, 1982: xix). There are two main flaws in assuming that the benefits of such mentoring can be replicated in formally planned contexts. First, it is impossible to conclude from Werner and Smith’s research whether the successful mentoring bonds created by some young people are a cause or an effect of their resilience. They may represent neither, but simply a researcher-constructed correlation. This issue is thrown into relief if we consider less resilient young people, who might find it difficult to bond with adults at all. In such cases, allocating them a mentor might be of little benefit, and would risk reinforcing rather than diminishing the young person’s sense of isolation. The second danger is that planned mentoring schemes risk ignoring or even working against the community-based networks of significant adults that this and similar studies revealed. Valuejudgements may dominate decisions about the social groups from which mentors will be sought. If there is a lack of understanding about the positive resources and adult support that are already available to young people, planned mentoring may well conflict with those informal networks.

Nevertheless, research agendas have continued to assume that investigations of young people’s self-sought mentor relationships ‘are likely to indicate fruitful ways of crafting policies and programs so they can be maximally effective for a more diverse population of young adolescents’ (Scales and Gibbons, 1996: 385). Beginning in the US at the start of the 1990s, and in Britain at the mid-point of the decade, the proliferation of such programmes indicates that the transference of mentoring into planned settings has been widely accepted as unproblematic.

A series of evaluations of localized projects in the US (e.g. Blechman, 1992; Dondero, 1997; DuBois and Neville, 1997; Haensley and Parsons, 1993; McPartland and Nettles, 1991; O’Donnell et al., 1997; Ringwalt et al., 1996; Zippay, 1995) indicate how planned youth mentoring began to flourish there. These projects reveal a distinct trend in respect of the goals that mentor relationships were supposed to pursue. These goals include so-called ‘soft outcomes’, such as enhanced self-esteem, but funding requirements almost always focus on ‘harder’ targets: educational goals including school-related behaviour and academic progress; social goals, such as the reduction of criminal offending and substance abuse; and employment-related goals, such as entry to the labour market or training programmes (McPartland and Nettles, 1991). As another project evaluation noted:

The use of mentors in social services programs has become an increasingly common intervention, and typically aims to increase education and job skills among at-risk youth.

(Zippay, 1995: 51, emphasis added)

Some of the reports of these schemes proffer uncritical and biased promotion of mentoring, appealing to policy-makers and institution managers to introduce prevention and/or intervention programmes with a strong mentoring element: ‘Mentoring is an old idea that works. . . . Adult mentors serve as beacons of hope for young people adrift in an uncertain world’, declares Dondero (1997: 881). Despite such optimism, they present extremely limited evidence of their claims for the benefits of mentoring.

Others avoid unsubstantiated claims of this kind, finding evidence of inconclusive and even negative outcomes of mentoring in relation to school achievement and/or antisocial behaviour (for a fuller review, see Dishion et al., 1999). One summer jobs programme for young African-American men reported worse outcomes in violence-related behaviours for those who had been mentored than for a non-mentored control group (Ringwalt et al., 1996). It is accordingly cautious about its conclusions. Similarly, McPartland and Nettles (1991) found that mentoring in Project RAISE appeared to produce no effects for student promotion rates and school test results, and only slight positive outcomes in relation to school attendance and grades for English coursework. While emphasizing the need for rigorous evaluation of future mentoring programmes given the lack of evidence to support such practice, they noted that this was not inhibiting its growing popularity:

RAISE managers are using our evaluation of the project’s first two years to intensify and focus their efforts for the future. They expect one-on-one mentoring to gradually become available for most student participants.

(McPartland and Nettles, 1991: 584, emphasis added)

Big Brothers Big Sisters shares a similar approach to these localized projects. It links young people from single-parent households with unrelated mentors, claiming the sole aim is to provide these young people with an adult friend, rather than seeking to improve or eradicate specific educational or socio-economic problems (Grossman and Tierney, 1998: 405). Nevertheless, it too promotes the setting of goals for young people around improved educational performance, the development of life skills and access to the labour market (Freedman, 1995: 216).

However, Freedman (1995, 1999) suggests that broader policy considerations have driven both practice and research in this field. He argues that mentoring is popular with policy-makers because it resonates with a number of their concerns: the moralization of social exclusion; the drive of economic competitiveness which proclaims the need for ‘upskilling’ and the threat posed by an ‘underclass’; the attraction of a cheap ‘quick fix’ to social problems; and its facile affinity with the individualistic philosophy of the ‘American Dream’. This produces a ‘heroic conception of social policy’ (Freedman, 1999: 21), which exhorts the white American middle classes to undertake a ‘crusade’ towards socially excluded (often black and Latino) young people. It is interesting to note here that President Bush’s support for the Big Brothers Big Sisters programme is linked to the use of the armed services as a pool for potential mentors (Miller, 2002). As youth mentoring has come, slightly later, to develop with similar fervour in Britain, the focus on employment-related goals has sharpened. This is particularly true in England, where there has been little funding for the looser model of befriending that has developed in Scotland (Forrest, 2002). Let us look at the emergence of engagement mentoring that has resulted.

The emergence of engagement mentoring

Skinner and Fleming (1999) argue that three broad models of youth mentoring have emerged in Britain. First, since 1993, Business–Education Partnerships have contributed to the formation of a model of ‘industrial mentoring’ in schools (Golden and Sims, 1997). Mentors are recruited from local businesses, and mentoring aims to encourage and raise the self-confidence of pupils, often prioritizing those who are predicted as ‘borderline’ for achieving Grade C GCSE passes. (This grade is regarded as the primary benchmark of achievement for the purposes of school league tables, entry to further education and training programmes, and employers’ recruitment and selection.) During the period of economic upturn which characterized the latter half of the 1990s, many firms have been willing to encourage employees and managers to volunteer as industrial mentors. Benefits to the companies are expected, both in the mentors’ development of communication and other mentoring skills that may be useful in their work roles, as well as in demonstrating corporate support for the local community.

The model aims to achieve four key goals:

Firstly, through enhancing students’ awareness of the world of work, mentoring contributes to the delivery of the work-related curriculum. . . . Secondly, [it] may have a positive impact on schools’ examination results. Thirdly, by focusing on the development of the individual, [it] can contribute to the delivery of students’ Personal and Social Education. . . . Mentoring may also make an indirect contribution to the development of local economies by helping to increase young people’s motivation and confidence to take advantage of training and employment opportunities.

(Golden and Sims, 1997: 26)

The outcomes identified for mentoring here are aimed at tailoring school-leavers’ aspirations to the demand-side of the local labour market, and raising schools’ performance in league tables. Despite some similarities with the employmentrelated goals of engagement mentoring, the target group differs significantly. Golden and Sims argue that a ‘good scheme will avoid targeting complete nonattenders as mentees’ (1997: 28). Schools are reluctant to waste busy mentors’ time, or to allocate them to young people whose attendance might be unreliable, or whose behaviour might prove unacceptable. Such schemes therefore tend to exclude the most disadvantaged young people.

A second model is that of ‘positive action’ or ‘community mentoring’, aimed at supporting young people from oppressed groups. These often target young men from black and Asian communities. Some schemes have targeted young women, to encourage them to pursue careers in science and engineering. Female youth workers have used men...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• References