Peer Mentoring

Young people supporting each other with their wellbeing

Our Peer Mentoring Programme offers a space for young people to come together to access and provide peer support to one another through group work, one-to-one activities and discussions. The programme has been co-produced with young people and our project partners, Mind in Camden and the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust. The core programme content has been informed by evidence-based models including the ‘5 ways to Wellbeing’ and ‘Resilience Framework’.

We offer different models of peer mentoring to schools and youth organisations and we work with them to identify the best option for their young people. We encourage a mutual aid approach, where young people take turns to mentor each other, as we know the act of supporting others can be especially beneficial. Together, young people and our partners develop themes for participants to explore that form a semistructure to the programme. We deliver accredited training for peer mentors to complete prior to delivering mentoring sessions.

Thanks to a grant from the GLA, we have also started a capacity building programme, delivering masterclasses to professionals within the youth sector, on key elements that promote quality mentoring, as well as continuous engagement from young people.

“The activities were really fun and engaging. I learnt a lot about what being a peer mentor means and involves, how to express myself and understand emotions better and how to speak confidently in front of a group”

“I really enjoyed the project, at first I wasn’t sure what to expect, but having the confidence to create and run my own mentoring sessions was really quite special. I’ll never forget this.”

"It's nice having someone going through the same thing you’re going through and being able to talk and play games, I feel like I can't always talk to my friends about it but with my mentor I can."

“I enjoyed the environment this has put me in as I grew closer with other people, I’m more aware of different feelings and emotions people might be going through. The sessions helped me understand how to support someone who might be struggling with their mental health and how to access different resources to help them”

“The facilitators created a super safe space for everyone to be heard and listened to. I really enjoyed getting together in a team and organising workshops for everyone else – it let me learn new things that I didn’t really know about before and improve the confidence in myself that I can do this, but it also let me appreciate other people’s strengths too”

FYA peer mentoring programme work in partnership with students and secondary schools across the borough to identify different ways of embedding peer support within each school. William Ellis is an example of a school which has taken a ‘whole school approach’ to peer support and peer mentoring.

Whole school approaches see young people from a year group trained up to become peer mentors to support peers in younger years. This could be through 1-1 sessions or groupwork sessions for students to access in a number of different ways.

William Ellis peer mentors met with mentees in younger years both through offering 1-1 sessions and running group activities for their mentees, all aimed at supporting their wellbeing at school, helping their peers feel less alone and that they always have someone to talk to, including signposting to other support within the school and beyond. Students who took part shared their own experiences of what helped them in school and supports their mental health and passed this on to their peers through the mentoring sessions that they designed as well as less structured peer support and mentoring offered during registrations and break times.

In this video you can see how William Ellis trained year 9s to support the new year 7s to feel welcome in the school and share any issues that they might be facing, for their mentors to troubleshoot and problem solve together.

Our Camden Youth Justice Service peer mentoring programme is a co-produced project made with young people that have previously accessed the service and members of the Camden Youth Justice staff team. Young people wanted to train as peer mentors to learn how to better support other young people who may be at risk of or involved in offending behaviours or affected by crime. Having been through the service themselves, young people were able to draw on their own lived experiences and could empathise with their peers who may share similar thoughts and feelings. The Youth Justice Service and young people wanted to embed peer support into their offer when working with young people they meet and so peer mentors were able to offer 1-1 peer mentroing sessions as well as group work sessions for their peers, all based around supporting mental health and building resilience, covering subjects from relationships and support network, identity and skills building.

FYA now supports this service annually, by training new peer mentors to offer peer support for young people who access Camden Youth Justice Service, which has embedded this approach into their work.

Watch a video about this programme:

FYA peer mentoring programme offers coproduced projects with young people and organisations creating a peer support model that works for them. In this model for Parliament Hill School, FYA trained up students who had their own experiences with mental health struggles and had previously accessed the school wellbeing service, to meet with younger peers who are currently accessing wellbeing support within the school. Young people in Year 9 were trained as mentors through our group programme first before offering 1-1 sessions to their younger peers. In our group model, everyone trains together to become peer mentors and get a chance to both access and provide peer support to one another (we refer to this as mutual aid).

After this, the group went on to share their learning with their younger peers and offer 1-1 mentoring sessions to their peers designed by them, to support their emotional wellbeing. Sessions were creative and included different learning styles to support the needs of the young people that they were working with. Students shared their own challenges openly within the group which helped mentees to ‘open up’.

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Peer Mentoring

Young people supporting each other with their wellbeing

Project in Numbers

Peer Mentoring in Numbers

*based on 2023-24 annual report

10

11

29

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