Student Mentoring Schemes

Students aged 14-19 in Lambeth can benefit from a range of mentoring programmes run by Lambeth Education Business Partnership.

What is mentoring?

Mentors are business people who support individual students one-to-one (or with small groups) to motivate and encourage young people to pursue their dreams and aspirations in a positive and practical way.

Since 1999 over 300 Lambeth school students have benefited from mentoring. Businesses providing mentors include Sainsburys, Shell, London Electricity, London Weekend Television, Lambeth Education and Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital Trust.

There are two kinds of mentoring schemes in Lambeth:

Face-to-face mentoring involves mentors and mentees meeting on a regular basis over and agreed period of time, usually one academic year. This is the most popular type of mentoring with mentors working either on a one-to-one basis or as group mentors supporting a small group of students.

E-mentoring is an exciting new mentoring initiative and is one of only a few being developed in the UK. E-mentors work with mentees in a similar way to face-to-face but use email to communicate with their mentees instead of meeting in school or at the workplace. Although E-mentors are not required to meet their mentees face-to-face, the programme we offer will include at least one or two meetings, at the beginning or near the end of the programme.

Young people ackowledge how useful a mentor can be:

"Mentors are good way of getting you interested in school work which otherwise would have seemed boring." says one.

Another adds: "Before I had a mentor I spent a lot of time just watching TV in my spare time. Since joining the programme I’ve learned to coach younger kids in sports and I'm learning more all the time."

Become a mentor

We welcome volunteers from all types of backgrounds to train as a mentor to help Lambeth school or college students raise their achievement and focus on career options.

Mentors benefit alongside the people they are mentoring. "By helping my student learn to set goals. I've become more aware of fulfilling my own goals."