Mentoring into higher education: A useful addition to the landscape of widening access to higher education?

Abstract

Alan Milburn, the Chair of the Government’s Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission recently highlighted the role of education in progressing social mobility in Scotland; ‘In my view it’s a grave social injustice that only one in forty pupils from Scotland’s most deprived households…got three As in their Highers in 2011, compared to one in ten across all income levels’. An analysis of the data on school leavers in Scotland also points towards a considerable inequality in access to higher education in particular. This paper reports on a research and development project that progressed the provision of intergenerational mentoring for young people from communities experiencing social and economic disadvantage. The findings affirm the role of research in such innovation and indicate that intergenerational mentoring offers a process, long awaited, through which young people can gain access to the different forms of social and cultural capital that are implicitly essential for progression into higher education.

Access and Emergence: A Case Study of a Working-Class Journey into Studying Medicine

“…This article draws on data generated from an ongoing research and development project which recruits retired professionals as mentors for young people from working-class and lower-income households who are considering going to university. Mentors, drawn from largely middle-class professional retirees, were a means through which young people could gain access to the different forms of social and cultural capital that are implicitly essential for progression into higher education (Wilson et al, 2014).…”

Poverty and education in Scotland:

“…This has implications for young people and schools in parts of Glasgow (and other parts of Scotland) and there have been a number of small scale interventions designed to assist young people from backgrounds of poverty and deprivation in entry to Higher Education. These include a mentoring programme at a secondary school in Glasgow aimed at helping these young people prepare for public examinations, navigate the application processes and negotiate the parameters of Higher Education (Wilson et. al., 2014).…”

Interventions to Improve Mentoring Over an Eight-Session Out-Of-School Workshop for High School Students (Work in Progress)

“…In university outreach activities, mentoring has been employed to attract a wider diversity of students to the engineering and science fields [8] - [10] and improve mentors' professional skills, such as leadership and teamwork [11] - [13]. The research involves a breadth of approaches to assessing programs, like Bandura's self-efficacy model [12], [14], [15], Bloom's taxonomy [16], and engineering competence development [15], to name a few.…”