Mind the Gap:
Policy goals and young people’s resistance in a mentoring programme
HELEN COLLEY
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Cardiff University, September 7-10 2000
in the Symposium
Problems with current approaches to social exclusion:
Bridging the Gap or Closing the Door?
convened by Professor Phil Hodkinson
This is a draft paper – critical comments are welcomed
Correspondance:
Helen Colley
Institute of Education (Crewe Campus)
the Manchester Metropolitan University
Crewe Green Road
Crewe
Cheshire CW1 5DU
e-mail:
ABSTRACT: This paper draws on research evidence from a study of mentoring relationships within a pre-vocational training scheme for 16-19 year olds identified as “disaffected”, based on principles underpinning current policies on social exclusion. In contrast with generally accepted theoretical models of mentoring, this evidence demonstrated more complex processes at work. It revealed significant gaps between the goals and assumptions of the scheme, and the desires and needs of the mentees. Many mentees and mentors felt unduly constrained by the tight focus on planning for employment. Unintended consequences emerged. Some mentees developed resistance strategies to avoid scheme requirements, whilst others were dismissed from the scheme. Some mentors accepted the young persons’ agenda, whilst others tried to impose the official view. Either way, subversion resulted. Consequently, some mentors became highly critical of the young people they were trying to help, reinforcing negative stereotypes of them as feckless and inadequate. A combination of these factors risked making things worse for some of the very people the scheme was supposed to help. This suggests that, for policy to be successful in this area, the goals need to be more closely in tune with the needs and aspirations of the young people themselves. Unless it does so, a climate of blame is likely to arise – possibly directed at young people, those who work as mentors, or even the practice of mentoring itself.
Mentoring moves into the mainstream of policy
Since the publication of Bridging The Gap (Social Exclusion Unit (SEU), 1999), the central focus of policy development in education and guidance has been the provision of individualised support to young people who are at risk. Mentoring appears to be a key component of this approach. Once seen as an informal activity, mentoring has become formalised in a range of institutions and contexts over the last two decades. In particular, since the mid-1990’s, a considerable number of mentoring schemes have been established for young people targeted as disaffected or socially excluded (Employment Support Unit, 2000, Skinner and Fleming, 1999). Most of these schemes initially operated with short-term funding outside of core provision by the DfEE or other government departments, and were seen as swimming against the tide of the previous administration’s policies (Ford, 1999). However, their example been taken enthusiastically on board by New Labour, and as such, they have laid the basis for the incorporation of mentoring into the mainstream of education, training and guidance policy.
The House of Commons Select Committee Report on Disaffected Children (Education and Employment Committee, 1998) recommended the use of mentors in all programmes seeking to re-integrate disaffected young people into formal learning and employment. The Home Office has incorporated mentoring into new youth justice policies (National Mentoring Network (NMN), 1999). The Department of Health is supporting the transference of the Big Brothers Big Sisters model from the US to develop mentoring programmes for young people at risk here (Skinner and Fleming, 1999). The DfEE has also pursued this recommendation vigorously, with initiatives including mentoring for ethnic minorities, gifted children, and pupils in inner city schools, as well as the Personal Adviser role intrinsic to transition programmes such as New Deal for Young People and the Learning Gateway (1999a,b,c,d). It doubled its bursary to the NMN (NMN, 1999), and has just called for bids to set up pilots for regional “Mentor Points” that will co-ordinate mentoring schemes throughout the country. The culmination of these developments is the proposal for the new youth support service, ConneXions, which will prioritise young people dropping out or at risk through the use of individual mentors (DfEE, 2000a).
Mentoring socially excluded young people
Piper and Piper (2000) have argued that a common, even defining feature of mentoring schemes for disaffected youth is a focus on employment-related goals. This distinguishes them from other models of youth mentoring, which usually have a looser and potentially wider agenda (e.g. Golden and Sims, 1997, Forbes, 2000). Their argument is substantiated by a number of evaluative reports that have recently appeared (e.g. ESU, 2000, Skinner and Fleming, 1999), which identify the primary purpose of mentoring the socially excluded as that of changing the beliefs, attitudes, values and behaviour of young people in line with employers’ requirements.
Employment-related goals are at the heart of the government’s agenda to tackle social exclusion with welfare-to-work policies. Prime Minister Blair has stated that: “Education is the best economic policy we have” (DfEE, 1998: 9), and that: “The best defence against social exclusion is having a job” (SEU, 1999: 6). Previous funding sources for such schemes, such as the European Social Fund (ESF) Youthstart programme, and their location in organisations such as Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs)[1] or Careers Services, have also tied the mentoring process to progression into employment.
Despite an acknowledgement of the benefits of “soft” outcomes registered by the evaluations of these early projects (such as the mentor’s perception of
enhancement in the young person’s self-esteem), new government policies still propose to determine funding according to the output of “hard” destinations for young people in structured education or training geared towards employment (Employment and Education Committee, 1998, DfEE, 1999d, 2000, SEU, 1999). But how appropriate or effective is the use of mentoring as a vehicle to achieve these ends?
Professional unease
There appears to be considerable unease and concern among practitioners in education, youth work and guidance (the main professional fields from which the staff of ConneXions will initially be drawn) about these policies. Examples of this disquiet have been seen this year at national conferences such as that of the Institute of Career Guidance (ICG), and that convened by the DfEE to discuss research into ConneXions, as well as regional multi-disciplinary events such as the conference on mentoring held by the North-West Post-16 Network. A major concern is that of ethical dilemmas posed by the new policies, “not least how they should square the goals of clients with those of the service” (Law, 2000: 33).
DfEE guidelines for practice in the Learning Gateway advocate the use of more directive methods with the young people who are “hardest to help”, and specifically argue against non-directive, client-centred counselling techniques (DfEE, 1999d). By contrast, from within the perspective of careers education and guidance, both ethics and theory have predominantly insisted on a practice rooted in such non-directive approaches (Egan, 1994, ICG, 2000, Kidd et al, 1993). This in turn relates to overall conceptions of the purpose of careers education and guidance, including the goals it encourages clients to pursue.
There is a tension here between the intentions of policy-makers and the professional perspective. The DfEE defines the purpose of guidance thus in its statutory requirements for the provision of Careers Services in England and Wales:
The purpose of the Careers Service is to contribute to the learning and prosperity of individuals, their communities and society as a whole. It does this by providing impartial information, guidance and help to enter appropriate education, training and employment. (DfEE, 1998b: 5, emphasis added)
However, quite different definitions can be offered from within a professional, rather than a policy, framework:
Career counselling is essentially about helping individuals to achieve vocational well-being; and this may be attainable in a variety of ways includingconstructive non-conformity and rational disaffection. (Ford, 1999: 13, emphasis added)
Lines (1998) points to the opposing directions in which such definitions lead, particularly the growing conflict between theory and practice which current policies generate. He notes “the predominance of the idea that guidance is about increasing the nation’s economic performance through its contribution to the production of a more smoothly operating labour market…” (Lines, 1998: 25). However, this assumed equivalence between the goals of careers education and guidance and the needs of the economy have been challenged (Hodkinson, 1996, Hodkinson et al, 1996). There have also been wider debates about the subservience of education and training to economic imperatives since James Callaghan raised the “Great Debate” and the New Right pursued its consequences throughout the last two decades (e.g. Avis et al, 1996, Stronach, 1989). It is just such tensions with regard to employment-related goals in mentoring “disaffected” young people that I wish to explore. I will begin by considering dominant theoretical models of mentoring, before looking at the research findings and finally considering implications for policy.
Power dynamics in mentoring
One of the difficulties of research and practice in this field is that mentoring is weakly conceptualised, and much of the literature is biased in favour, failing to provide any critical analysis (Gulam and Zulfiqar, 1998, Standing, 1999, Merriam, 1983, Piper and Piper, 2000). (For a much fuller treatment of the historical development of concepts of mentoring, see Colley, 2000a,b.) A few more critical approaches have tried to address this confusion, by considering the ways in which agendas and goals are negotiated and pursued within mentoring relationships (e.g. DeMarco, 1993, Gay and Stephenson, 1998, Millwater and Yarrow, 1997). This raises questions of the power dynamics at play.
Overwhelmingly, the literature on mentoring, including the more critical analyses, suggests that the dyadic relationships it creates are inherently unequal and therefore hierarchical. Power is thought to reside in the person of the mentor, who, even in peer mentoring, is generally older, more experienced, more knowledgeable or more connected in the field the mentee seeks to enter. This is reflected in discussions of styles of mentoring, particularly more recent debates about the degree to which mentoring can be an empowering process for the mentee. Ford (1999) states boldly that: “Skilled mentoring is about empowerment” (p.13). In contrast, a review of 12 projects aimed at disaffected young people seeks to clarify the way empowerment is interpreted within them:
It is perhaps worth noting that none of the projects had a more radical agenda. The goal, for better or for worse, is to help young people cope with and adapt to society, not to give them the ambition or the tools to change it. Empowerment is seen as an individualistic concept, with no suggestion of disaffected young people working together as a group in order to understand and alter the conditions which lead to social exclusion and inequalities. (Merton and Parrot, 1999: 25)
Empowerment is thus a concept which is itself delimited by the goals of the overall programme.
Theoretical discussions of mentoring (e.g. DeMarco, 1993, Gay and Stephenson, 1998, Millwater and Yarrow, 1997) often revolve around spectra focusing on the way in which mentors use or share their power in assisting the mentee to achieve their goals, in the following kinds of oppositions:
directive / non-directivecontrolling / empowering
hierarchical / reciprocal
Whatever the position on the spectrum, ultimately the mentor is seen as transmitter and the mentee as receptor of the goals. The attainment of the goals may be more or less of a two-way process, but the power dynamics seem to be construed as one-directional. Although this may be expressed in a variety of ways, “good” mentoring involves the benign use of power by the mentor, and “bad” mentoring reflects abuse of that power. (See Gore, 1992, for a criticism of the assumption that power is a property rather than a set of social relations, which seems to be inherent in these views.)
However, with the increasing formalisation of mentoring, institutional goals have begun to intrude into supposedly dyadic relationships, and determine the agenda that mentoring will pursue (Gay and Stephenson, 1998). Where this happens, mentoring is inevitably shifted further towards the directive end of the power-dynamics spectrum. Rather than the mentor-mentee dyad negotiating individual agendas, mentoring becomes a triadic relationship, in which the mentor acts as a vehicle for goals that have been set elsewhere.
The nature of the research
My PhD study aims to contribute to an understanding of processes in mentoring relationships, and at the same time to explore the relationship between structure and agency in those processes within their specific institutional and socio-political context. For these reason I chose a qualitative approach, combining interpretive methods that would generate deeper insights in these aspects of mentoring (Mason, 1996) with critical theories and analysis (Anderson, 1989). It consists of a case study of a project I shall call New Beginnings, run by Wellshire TEC (all names and locations are anonymised to protect confidentiality).
I carried out 46 semi-structured interviews, each between 1 and 1½ hours long, with mentors, young people, scheme staff and managers, and staff in the local careers service and youth service. I also observed the training course for student mentors and two follow-up support meetings run by the university, and a number of New Beginnings steering committee meetings, as well as having numerous opportunities to observe activities and talk informally with staff at the New Beginnings office.
My sampling criteria in the first round of data generation were determined by my aim of interviewing both members of mentoring dyads, and that they should have met together for at least 6 weeks to ensure that relationships were well-established. Due to the high turnover of young people, and low numbers taking up the option of having a mentor, I aimed to interview the total population in the period during which I had access, and in fact only two pairs declined to take part in the research for personal reasons. This generated data 9 mentors and 8 young people, as one young person had two different mentors. Both these mentors were also interviewed twice, at different stages in their mentoring relationships. In the second round of data generation, a year later, I focused on the three relationships which were still on-going, as well as returning to the young people whose mentoring had ended. I was able to interview all of the previous respondents in this tranche, except for one mentee whom I was unable to contact.
My reading of the literature discussed above had given me certain initial expectations of what I would find. I imagined I would observe “successful” mentoring relationships, where the mentor engaged the young person with the goals of the scheme, and the young person complied. I also expected that some young people would not comply, and would simply vote with their feet. In fact I found that much more complex processes seemed to be taking place. I will begin by outlining the set up at the scheme, and the goals it clearly pursued.
The goals of mentoring at New Beginnings
The young people
New Beginnings was designed for young people aged 16-19 outside structured education and training. It was a special provision which aimed to meet the government’s guarantee of a Youth Training (YT) place for those young people whose need for intensive individual support could not be met in mainstream training. Most were referred to New Beginnings by the local Careers Service when trying to claim benefits. This did represent an element of compulsion for some young people, as most were either ineligible for benefits (which are only available to 16 and 17 year olds under exceptional circumstances). Those who might have been eligible were still denied benefits, because, under the YT guarantee, a suitable training opportunity at New Beginnings was deemed to exist, whatever problems they might be experiencing. The £45 a week training allowance at New Beginnings was thus the only (legal) access to income that some young people had.
The scheme provided in-house pre-vocational training with one-to-one or very small group tutoring, including literacy, numeracy and IT. When ready, the young people were allocated a work experience placement. The ultimate goal was to place the young person in YT or a job. This goal was supported by a personal development plan reviewed weekly with scheme staff; progressive work towards punctuality, attendance and behaviour to standards of workplace discipline; and the option of meeting with a mentor for an hour a week.
An important point to note is that the only young people I spoke with were those who had engaged with the scheme to some degree, agreed to have a mentor, and proved capable of establishing a relationship with that mentor. In Williamson and Middlemiss’ (1999) typology of disaffection, ranging from the “temporarily confused” to the “deeply alienated”, these young people were definitely at the more tractable end of the scale.