Pre-HE Mentoring Programmes: Rapid Evidence Review

This is a rapid review of a sample of evaluation reports concerning pre-HE (outreach) mentoring programmes for young people. The report identified a number of key practical and implementation issues associated with the impact of mentoring programmes, including the targeting, selection and recruitment of mentees and mentors, the role of mentor training, and how mentoring is understood to deliver its objectives (either as a delivery mechanism for other programme elements, or itself the key mechanism of change). The report goes on to provide an overview of the evaluation approaches adopted across the case studies and identifies a series of evaluation challenges, many of which are likely to be common to the evaluation of other pre-HE outreach activities. The report concludes with a summary of 9 case studies, comparing mentoring programme design and implementation, intended outcomes and evaluation approach. Although primarily written for an audience considering developing or delivering a mentoring programme in this space, we hope that elements of this report, including a discussion of evaluation challenges, may have wider relevance.