New £15m programme will test the power of mentoring for secondary school students facing barriers

Football Beyond Borders has been announced as our first delivery partner for the pioneering £15m Building Futures programme, a mentoring intervention for young people facing barriers who are at risk of missing out on further learning or employment.

The latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) data shows that around one in eight 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK are not in education, employment or training (NEET), a challenge that has been on the rise, peaking at 900,000 this year. Falling into unemployment at the start of working life can leave long-term scars, so testing preventative interventions, in the early teenage years, is vital for the widespread changes needed to tackle this.

Funded by Dormant Assets and awarded by Government, Building Futures will develop and test a package of targeted support to build evidence about how mentoring can be used most effectively to empower students who are struggling.

During the initial phase of the programme, Football Beyond Borders will deliver personalised coaching, mentoring and wellbeing support to up to 500 young people aged 12 to 15 over a whole academic year. Eight schools from areas with high NEET rates across the West Midlands, North West and London will be the first to participate.

Students will have both one-to-one and group sessions, with personalised, sustained and intensive support, including the delivery of a social and emotional learning curriculum. Mentors are trained to become relatable, consistent and trusted adults in the lives of young people. They will be paid staff with at least two years of relevant experience and qualifications, recruited to match the backgrounds and life experiences of the young people.

The aim is to increase engagement in education while improving wellbeing, to reduce young people’s likelihood of being NEET at age 18. The multi-year programme will reach at least 5,000 young people from now until 2029, with findings from the evaluation tracking the impact on young people’s education and employment outcomes in the years afterwards.

Football Beyond Borders were chosen as the first delivery partner because of their successful track record of building trusted relationships with young people in schools from areas of socio-economic disadvantage and their experience in using therapeutic mentoring interventions. The quality of relationships between mentor and mentee has been found to be a key factor in achieving positive outcomes.

The design of Building Futures will have the strongest international evidence for mentoring at its heart. The first stage will consist of a test-and-learn approach with the selected partner schools to help build the most promising version of this programme for wider delivery and testing. This will build to a multi-staged evaluation, including the undertaking of a gold-standard randomised controlled trial, which will test how mentoring influences employment outcomes later in life.

Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, said: 

“The Dormant Assets Scheme has unlocked almost £1 billion for good causes across the UK, driving powerful change in our communities.

 

“This government will continue to support valuable, active interventions for young people through this fund, and our important partnership with civil society.”

Barry Fletcher, CEO of the Youth Futures Foundation, said:

“We are delighted to launch Building Futures with our partners at Football Beyond Borders and to be working with young people who most need this extra help, whilst crucially as a What Works Centre, building the evidence base.

 

The youth unemployment and inactivity challenge across our country requires dedicated and long-term attention from Government, employers, civil society and all our partners. This needs to be informed by the most robust evidence, of which Building Futures is an essential part.”

Jack Reynolds, CEO of Football Beyond Borders, said:

“We’re delighted to be partnering with Youth Futures Foundation on the Building Futures programme.

 

“Youth Futures and Football Beyond Borders share a focus on developing an evidence base on the effectiveness of trusted adult relationships to achieve long-term outcomes for vulnerable young people.”

Marzana, Member of the Building Futures Youth Advisory Group, said:

“Being in Year 11, I can tell you, me and a lot of my friends struggle with balancing a social life, grades and the pressures of growing up and figuring life out. Particularly as I have anxiety it can get overwhelming at times.”