Mentoring for young people not in education, employment or training: A 'NEET' solution, but to whose problems?

Helen Colley
Introduction

Mentoring has been described as 'the kindness of strangers', but how 'kindly' is it, and whose problems is it supposed to solve? This paper explores the experience of mentoring for young people not in education, employment or training, drawing on data from a longitudinal qualitative study of mentor relationships that reveals their processes and dynamics in fine-grained detail. Through analysing these experiences, I seek to go beyond the superficial 'feel-good factor' that mentoring often evokes, to question the policies that shape it in practice, and to suggest that we need to think a great deal more carefully about the use of fairly intimate relationships as vehicles for achieving welfare-to-work outcomes.

I begin by outlining the spectacular growth of the mentoring movement internationally and in the UK, and the slim evidence on which this is based. I then trace the ways in which European policy has shaped engagement mentoring in Britain for young people not in education, training or employment. The heart of the paper presents two detailed case studies from one local engagement mentoring scheme that I researched, focusing on the young people’s perspectives. I conclude by considering some of the implications of these findings for policy and practice.

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