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National Evaluation of Youth Justice Board Mentoring Schemes 2001 to 2004
Institute of Education, University of London, 2005
Between 2001 and 2004, the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales (YJB) supported 80 community mentor projects distributed across England and Wales. The projects set out to deliver mentor programmes to young people who had offended or were at risk of doing so. This report evaluates the projects’ effectiveness and costs in achieving their aims.
Mentor programmes involve a trusting relationship in which a more experienced person helps, and provides a role model, for someone who is less experienced. Building on this relationship, the mentor programmes evaluated here were ‘competency focused’. That is, they set out to teach basic literacy, numeracy, social, or life skills, in the hope that such skills would help the young people to interact better with their social and physical environments, and so improve their prospects.
The mentor projects targeted groups of young people who had offended, or were at risk of offending, and who were believed to be likely to benefit from mentor programmes of this type. The groups were: Black minority ethnic (BME), or ‘hard-to- reach’ young people (targeted by BME mentor projects) and young people with literacy and numeracy (LN) needs (targeted by LN mentor projects).
The evaluation as a whole included four studies with different methods, designed to overlap in order to minimize the methodological limitations of each approach. The studies were:
- The Database Study, which used a standard computer database to collect the mentor projects’ records about the delivery and outcome of their mentor programmes
- The Depth Study, which obtained direct, formal and interview assessments of a sample of mentored young people, and of a matched non-mentored comparison group, at baseline and outcome points
- The Reconviction Study, which employed Home Office Police National Computer records to measure rates and severity of offending and reoffending in mentored and comparison young people
- The Costs Study, which assessed whether the mentor projects provided good value for money.
This report can be found at: http://www.youth-justice-board.gov.uk/Publications/Scripts/prodView.asp?idProduct=279&eP=YJB
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