MENTORING
Mentoring is a powerful tool which we use to show young people how to maximise their potential through managing their learning and organisation themselves. The mentoring relationship is not about a mentor telling their mentee what to do. Instead it is about asking the right questions and providing an impartial sounding board; in this way a mentor should give their mentee opportunities to reach the ‘right’ conclusions themselves.
In this sense, the mentoring that we provide stands apart from our tutoring. Our students benefit from having a purely pastoral relationship with their mentor. We match students with mentors who we think will be able to build a trusting and positive working relationship with them, to help them maximise their potential at all sorts of different moments in their educational career. Often it helps to have an adult in place who has a grip on the overall picture but without the complexity of a student’s relationship with their parents or school teachers.
Of course, boundaries and expectations in terms of reporting back to the mentee’s parents are made clear from the start; we recommend that each mentoring conversation is followed by a written report of what is said, outlining what has been achieved since the last conversation and recording any targets set.