Mentoring students and young people - review

Title: Mentoring Students and Young People
Author: Andrew Miller
Publisher: Kogan Paul
ISBN: 0749435437
Price: £19.99
Format: Paperback

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This book offers a comprehensive guide to establishing, monitoring and evaluating monitoring programmes. The author draws upon his considerable personal experience and compares and contrasts schemes in UK with ‘abroad’ including Canada, Australia USA and Israel. It is dense with information and descriptions of programmes and points the way to methods of quantitative and qualitative research and assessment of achievement.

Although it is early days in the development of mentoring as a discipline of helping there is already a considerable body of literature on the topic and Miller has put a great effort into research both on the ground (particularly commendable is his description of evaluation via key performance indicators). He is involved in the National Mentoring Network. The guide, which they have published, and to which he refers is an excellent model to first determine what type of evaluation is appropriate (internal or external to the scheme) and then to set up a strategy.

This is more of an academic treatise on how to set up schemes rather than a how-to book for would-be mentors, although he does point the way for those who are in that category.

Miller is particularly sound in offering models for planning and managing mentoring programmes and has copied (with their permission)the model programme flow charts put together by the RPS Rainer organisation.

The chapter I found most enlightening was the one on minority ethnic monitoring. He raises the thorny issue of whether mentors should be matched, with their students on the basis of shared race or ethnicity. He concludes there are benefits to both cross-ethnicity mentoring and same-ethnicity mentoring but warns that the former requires particular sensitivity to building partnerships with the relevant community if the programme is to be effective. He gives good advice about the planning and implementation stages of these programmes.

This book is recommended as an important first step for any organisation contemplating a mentoring scheme and should serve as creative inspiration for anyone looking for ways to develop potential in young people.

The pity is that it lacks the light touch of humour and eschews anecdotal evidence about individual progress. That is a pity for surely it is in the progress made by individuals, in particular the changes in attitudes, which gives human warmth to the mentoring contacts and would encourage more people to offer themselves for what has been proved to be a worthwhile service.

Judith Usiskin

TrainingZONE, 30-Oct-2002
Categories: HRZ Reviews, Coaching and Mentoring
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