A £1 million scheme that aims to enlist an army of hundreds of mentors to give support and guidance to care-experienced high-school pupils has been launched in a Scottish city.

Breakthrough Dundee is up and running in the city’s Morgan Academy, with plans to move into St Paul’s Academy by October and the other six Dundee secondaries by 2019, supporting 500 young people.

The scheme has secured £1 million funding for three years from Northwood Charitable Trust, set up by the family behind publisher DC Thomson - most famous for the Beano and Dandy comics, as well as the Sunday Post newspaper.

Breakthrough Dundee will match around 40-50 pupils in S3-6 in each school with a volunteer mentor, who they will meet for an hour a week.

Pupils with experience of the care system will be given priority, although it is expected that other vulnerable young people will also join the programme.

Each Dundee secondary will have a mentor coordinator who will also be responsible for delivering group work sessions to pupils in S1 and S2 and securing inspirational work experience taster sessions for mentors and mentees.

Closing the gap

For many years, there has been a focus on improving the educational outcomes of looked-after children in Scotland, but a huge attainment gap remains in place.

Figures published earlier this year showed that only 40 per cent of looked-after children who left school last year achieved at least one qualification at the equivalent of National 5, compared to 86 per cent of all school leavers.

The aim of the Breakthrough Dundee scheme is to close this gap further. It is taking inspiration from the success of a Glasgow programme - MCR Pathways Young Glasgow Talent initiative - which is already producing positive results.

Last year, 81 per cent of the Glasgow pupils who left school after being mentored through MCR Pathways entered higher or further education or employment. Only 51 per cent of non-mentored, care-experienced young people entered a positive destination in 2016.

According to Glasgow’s director of education Maureen McKenna, the mentoring “has had an incredible impact on the positive destinations of the young people who’ve been mentored”.

However, according to the Education Endowment Foundation’s teaching and learning toolkit, which attempts to summarise the impact on attainment and the cost of interventions, from reducing class sizes to employing more classroom assistants, “the impact of mentoring is low in terms of direct effect on academic outcomes.”

It estimates that, on average, mentoring programmes lead to about one month’s additional progress. However, it adds that there is some evidence that pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds can benefit by up to about two months’ additional progress.

So far in Dundee, more than 90 people have expressed an interest in volunteering as mentors. Iona Lawson, who worked in media relations for an investment bank in London before moving to Scotland nine years ago, is one of them. Ms Lawson, who has three children and now works part-time from her home in Fife, says it was the impact of the Glasgow scheme that motivated her to sign up.

Ms Lawson said: “I give up a small amount of my time and it can lead to a dramatic improvement in a teenager’s life. If you look at the figures for Glasgow it’s a no-brainer.”

Rosie Ivins is the Dundee scheme’s first mentor coordinator and is based at Morgan Academy. Ms Ivins comes from a youth work background. She believes two elements will secure the scheme’s success: the fact that the volunteers have to commit for a minimum of a year and the careful matching process to pair up mentors and mentees.

Ms Ivins said: “These young people need stability and continuity and consistency. A lot of them will be very much used to a lot of different workers and volunteers may have engaged with them in the past. From my experience, volunteering can be really sporadic but with this programme the absolute minimum people commit to is a year so that relationship can be built.”

Mentors and mentees will be asked about their personalities, their interests, their likes and their dislikes, in a bid to ensure that suitable matches are made.

Ms Ivins estimates that the first pupils the scheme enlists should be paired with their mentors after the October holidays.

The chairman of Breakthrough Dundee, Ellis Watson - who is executive chairman of DC Thomson Publishing - believes the programme has the potential to be “life-changing”.

He said: “Breakthrough is an incredible initiative that targets 500 care-experienced and other vulnerable young people, identified by the social care system, in Dundee’s secondary schools. Without radical intervention, statistics demonstrate that some of these young people will falter in life and fail.”