Early Intervention & Pupils at Risk of Exclusion

“Michaels Mentors is an organisation based in Birmingham, West Midlands that works with primary school & high school pupils at risk of exclusion.

We work in Academies, Colleges, Pupil Referral Units, Youth offenders’ institutes & alternative provision schools too.

Michaels Mentors also specialises in working with football clubs & athletes.

We cover the whole of the West & East Midlands & London.

Michaels Mentors is one of the UK’s leading mentoring organisations”

Michaels Mentors Approach

Engagement begins with an initial meeting between mentor/mentee to create a mutual working agreement. This initial meeting is a first step to begin to understand the mentee and the barriers they face so we are equipped to foresee any problems. This is vital to avoid future relationship breakdown, before we do anything, we need to agree what a good mentor looks like to them (e.g. listens well, doesn’t judge etc.) and what a good mentee looks like to us (honesty, commitment etc.) so that we can be good role model and shape up a relationship that works for both parties. We combine quality 1-2-1 mentoring with compassionate but consistent behavioural boundary setting to reduce conflict, promote healthier futures and reduce repetitive patterns of dis- engagement both in and outside of school.

Skill Building

• Emotional intelligence, particularly building good relationships and collaborating effectively
• Social and emotional competence, particularly in relation to collaboration
• Resilience and coping
• Perceptions of self (self-confidence and self-efficacy)
• Motivation, goal orientation and perseverance
• Conflict resolution 

Research supporting this

Early intervention is always beneficial, adolescence and teenage years are an important time for developing social/emotional skills, The program supports mentees to avoid getting into harm whilst providing opportunities that improve positive pathways into employment, education and training. Social/emotional skills have a fast-improving evidence base: showing association with later life outcomes. These skills/attitudes/behaviours are widely accepted as important, measurable and malleable, they also underpin broader capabilities such as collaborative problem-solving. Self-efficacy, self-esteem and self-regulation are linked with positive long term wellbeing outcomes in adulthood. There are also links between these skills and academic attainment, with several reports and large-scale studies demonstrating that effective intervention programmes which have a positive long-term, impact on students’ social/emotional skills also positively impact enhanced academic attainment and reduced substance use.

Impact measures

Our delivery includes obtaining feedback/measuring the impact of our work, to ensure we continually improve services. Mentoring is tailored to mentees interests and we work with them to measure impact across a variety of areas including moods, motivation, friendships, relationships.

“Michaels Mentors use a smart and intuitive customised software platform which makes managing data and measuring impact easy.

We can organise and analyse data whether it be gender, nationality, analyse mental wellbeing assessments and the see the number of hours that has been spent with pupils individually or as a collective.

We are instantly able to pull off reports on every pupil and export notes to teachers on every single child, and see the impact that our mentoring organisation has had at any given time.”