Mentoring is 'high up' on the political agenda

22nd May 2009

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ePolitix.com speaks to Steve Matthews, chief executive of the Mentoring and Befriending Foundation, about the future of the organisation and the challenges they face in the coming months.

Question: When was the foundation created and how far has it come since then?

Steve Matthews: The foundation started back in 1995 when it was set up as the National Mentoring Network. It was a project that initially got funding from the Department for Education to establish a network of mentoring practitioners around the country to develop and share best practice. Since then, the organisation has developed into what is now the Mentoring and Befriending Foundation. It is a separate organisation with separate charitable status. We became the Mentoring and Befriending Foundation in 2005 when we changed the name, to broaden out the remit of our work to encompass befriending.

We are a strategic partner of the Office of the Third Sector, which is part of the Cabinet Office. They fund us to provide capacity building support to mentoring and befriending organisations within the statutory and voluntary sectors. We also work with government departments to help them to shape their policy and thinking around mentoring and befriending and how it can fit into their priorities and objectives.

Question: What does the future look like for the foundation?

Steve Matthews: The future is reasonably bright because fortunately mentoring is very high up on the political agenda at the moment. It comes across in a number of policy strands. For example, the Department for Children, Schools and Families are attaching a lot of importance to mentoring through their Aim Higher initiative. It is also reflected in the Children's Plan where mentoring is a key part of the plan. The value of one-to-one mentoring can be used to support children and young people in a whole variety of ways - tackling behavioural issues, supporting achievement and building confidence and self-esteem.

It is also something that is beneficial in supporting a whole range of other different client groups. There is interest from the Department of Communities and Local Government in the role that mentoring and befriending can play in supporting community cohesion, by working with individuals that may be socially isolated or excluded. You also see it in terms of befriending support for older people. There is a lot of interest in inter-generational mentoring at the moment, where older people are mentoring or being mentored by younger people. That seems to be a great way of building stronger communities and bringing different generations of people together.

Question: Why do you think the government has taken notice of the value of mentoring and befriending?

Steve Matthews: I think they have always believed that one-to-one support, particularly where it is voluntarily given, is a way of supporting socially excluded or vulnerable groups of people. In many ways, it is there to support existing services. And in some cases, it can actually provide a better more useful service to individuals who desperately need support and contact from other individuals in their lives. They can call on somebody who is there to listen to them, who can help them look at the issues in their lives and signpost them to new opportunities.

Therefore, I believe the interest has always been there. I think the government sees it as a complement to existing services. Because the state obviously can't support a lot of these services there is an obvious role for the voluntary sector such support. One-to-one support in the form of mentoring and befriending can play a key role in complementing statutory services e.g supporting individuals with disabilities, helping refugees or new arrivals into the country to seek employment or training or helping an ex-offender re-settle back into the community.

Question: Are you involved in working with cross-party MPs and policy makers?

Steve Matthews: There is a cross-party mentoring group that meets three or four times a year with the support of the Office of the Third Sector. We invite representatives from different government departments to come to that group and talk about how mentoring and befriending is being used to support their policy initiatives and it is a good way of sharing information about the value of mentoring across government. I think that the advent of the Office of the Third Sector as a way of generating cross-governmental support for volunteering has been an enormous help in bringing the different departmental perspectives on mentoring.

We held an event last year in the House of Commons where we invited MPs to meet projects from their constituencies. We invited the projects to bring along some of their volunteers and service users. The event was well attended by MPs and we had ministers and shadow ministers who came along to meet projects from their constitencies.

We are also actively pursuing links with the other main political parties to feed into their policy development. I know, for example, that some of the shadow ministers have experienced first-hand the benefits of mentoring for young people having undertaken work experience with mentoring charities.

Question: What are the main challenges facing mentoring and befriending in the short and long term?

Steve Matthews: In the short term, the challenges are very much focused around influencing funders and commissioners within local authorities and PCTs about the value of one-to-one mentoring and befriending. We need to convince them that mentoring and befriending can contribute to their local needs and priorities. Consequently, a lot of the work we are focusing on over the next year or so is to work with local authorities and commissioners and to bring them into face to face contact with projects, so they can see the difference that mentoring and befriending can make.

Similarly, funders are important contributors to many of the voluntary organisations and projects that we work with. We are working with them to encourage and promote increased funding opportunities for mentoring and befriending programmes and the role that the Approved Provider Standard can play in helping to assess suitable applications for funding.

In the longer term, there are still issues around how we encourage organisations that are running mentoring and befriending services to invest in the quality of their programmes and how to ensure they are operating safely and effectively. We have our own quality standard, the Approved Provider Standard, which has now been achieved by nearly 500 organisations. This demonstrates that there is a commitment to quality provision out there, but more needs to be done to increase the number of quality assured programmes working in the area.

Another issue is that there still needs to be more research into the impact of mentoring and befriending on individuals. We're trying to encourage more longitudinal research to be undertaken into the area. One of the things about mentoring and befriending is that it is not a short term option. It is something that needs to be assessed over a longer period of time if we are to convince government, commissioners and funders of the value of investing in these programmes over a sustained period of time.

The difficulty we have is that a lot of funding is generally short term and we would like to encourage funders and commissioners to invest in three-year programmes, if not longer, in order to justify the investment and ensure that projects have the opportunity to demonstrate real impact. We also have to work with the projects themselves to encourage them to evaluate their services more effectively.

Question: What has been the impact of the current economic climate and what is the MBF doing to continue unabated?

Steve Matthews: We recognise that we have a key role to play in supporting organisations that may be suffering during the economic downturn. We are implementing a range of measures including additional training courses, guidance and support to help projects during the downturn.