Mentoring Fund Evaluation

A national mentoring campaign was launched by the Government in January 2016 to connect a new generation of mentors to pre-GCSE teenagers. Later that year, The Careers & Enterprise Company launched a Fund to support mentoring activities young people, with the objective of ensuring that; ‘25,000 young people at risk of disengagement in the run-up to their GCSEs have a mentor in place by 2020’. 

This digest summarises some of the main findings from the external evaluation of the Fund. The evaluation assessed the extent to which the funded programme met its aims in supporting young people and extending the reach of mentoring activities with employers and amongst schools. 

This ambitious programme had three main components: 

• to reach a significant number of young people who were at risk of disengagement in the years leading up to their GCSEs 
• to work with schools across all LEP areas to include mentoring in their careers programmes 
• to increase the number of mentors volunteering to support young people