The Centre for Excellence in Mentoring

Mentoring plays a significant role across education, youth justice, social care, and community-based support. It is delivered in a wide range of settings and forms, often by small and medium-sized organisations working close to need. While practice has continued to develop, the infrastructure supporting learning, evidence, and commercial sustainability has not kept pace with the demands placed on the sector by funders, commissioners, and policymakers.

 

This prospectus sets out the case for establishing a Centre for Excellence in Mentoring as a practical response to that gap. The Centre is conceived as a place for business development and learning, focused on helping mentoring organisations use evidence from their own delivery more effectively. Its emphasis is not on compliance or reporting, but on improving practice, strengthening delivery, and supporting organisations to secure funding, contracts, and build long-term sustainability.

 

The Centre will be built and managed through collaboration. It will take a coordinated approach to research, evaluation, and learning across different mentoring models, while respecting local context and organisational autonomy. By developing shared evaluation resources, aligning evaluation activity, and focusing on the questions that matter most to practice and commissioning, the Centre aims to reduce duplication and increase the value derived from existing mentoring delivery.