COMMENTARY: In the following sequence, practitioners from different institutions within the Secure
Sector share their experiences of introducing peer mentoring into their own teaching contexts.
Their comments are taken from a discussion relating to the NIACE mentoring scheme.
Here, the discussions are led by a Senior NIACE Associate.
SESSION LEADER: It’s a scheme run by NIACE, funded by BIS, to train prisoners to act as
mathematical mentors to other prisoners. And the way it works is that, either, NIACE will go in and do a
one day training programme with a group of maybe 10/a dozen mentors and those mentors
then might operate on the wing, typically with things like canteen sheets, or they might
work as, in effect, classroom assistants in ordinary maths classes or maybe in vocational/industrial
workshops. So either that happens or, more recently, we’ve started to do
something slightly different. I’ll go in to a prison, the prison will have
got a number of other prisons together and then we do a one day session. At the end of that
the maths teachers and the managers go off and do their own training of their own mentors.
SESSION LEADER: There is a maths mentor handbook, which has in it a full days training for maths mentors.
So the staff get that, they can then take a group of their own people through using
that as a structure and then each mentor gets a set of books – plus a t-shirt.
PRACTITIONER 1: I found the maths mentoring one very good for me – running the training day
because it gave me a structure. I’ve only ever been a maths or English teacher,
so I hadn't got a clue how to run a mentoring course. So it actually gave me a very good
starting point, to link to our other mentoring qualifications and I found it really useful.
PRACTITIONER 2: Yes, well I’ve just got the go ahead to start running it last week and
I'm going to do the training, again linking it to the learning aims so that they’ll be on a
level 2 NCFE mentoring qualification. Get the mentors trained up and out on the wings.
[And] do some publicity.
PRACTITIONER: I’ve got two chartered accountants, one of whom is my age, so his subtraction,
or his multiplication or division is different to how most of the young prisoners would know.
So we’ve done a bit of work around that.
Otherwise they’re off and they’re going to run sessions on their own – sort of drop in sessions.
So a prisoner who’s taking an exam can go and get some help by wearing
the t-shirt and things. So that’s how we've organised it so far.
SESSION LEADER: Other issues about getting it set up?
PRACTITIONER 2: Yes, I had to go and pitch for it at our reducing re-offending meeting.
I think my worry, for us, is our churn, because our churn's 250/300 a month. So it’s how
long am I going to keep the mentors for, but that’s just what it is. So I’ve got to
go with it and, yes, I’m really looking forward to running it.
PRACTITIONER 3: For us, with bringing in your maths mentors, was a actually really easy step because
we had a really strong mentoring ethos in place already. And this was just a kind of an additional,
and a specific, role for the maths mentors. So actually we have a team of 20 mentors, something
like that, that’s already well established – but that took time to set up at the beginning.
SESSION LEADER: It does. It takes a bit or work because you’ve got to find your mentors
and you've got to find the right people.
You’ve got to promote it. Well, you’ve got to get them trained, you've got to put them through
the training – after which they wear the t-shirt. And that’s the best promotion
of the lot, to actually see people wearing the t-shirt. But then, I just want to make sure people,
anybody thinking about setting this up knows there’s work to be done. Some prisons
get one of their mentors to act as a coordinator. Kind of, make sure that the resources are available as and
when individual mentors want them. So it does ebb and flow and there needs to be somebody in the
team, the staff team. Either a maths person or an education manager – or preferably both.
Who’s going to drive it and keep on supporting it cyclically.
SESSION LEADER: Prisoners who are going to become mentors,
don’t have to have to already have a particular level of maths or a particular qualification
– in our view anyway. They just have to be willing to discuss the issues of boundaries
and make decisions with the education staff as to where and when they work – and when
they stop, and how they move out of a situation if it’s getting too tricky for them, and so on.
But that means that anybody can be a mentor at an appropriate level.
SESSION LEADER: You know, when you say he works with them on the wing – do you know what kind of
maths he does with them on the wing? PRACTITIONER 4: He talks them through
their canteen sheets. SESSION LEADER: Does he?
PRACTITIONER 4: Yes... SESSION LEADER: Canteen sheet is one of the
activities in the module. PRACTITIONER 4: He irons out misconceptions, they
get the love for maths – and off they go. They’re in education, it doesn’t take too long.
SESSION LEADER: Thinking about interviewing a couple of the mentors after they’d been doing it for a while,
and couple of them said things like,
this has given me an opportunity to develop my own maths in ways that were not possible
otherwise. It's not just that the mentees benefit – the mentors actually benefit.
PRACTITIONER 1: In fact one of mine said that, he's got his level 2, and the next thing he said is
"but it’s so good, because it’s keeping my maths to the fore, I’m developing all the time."
And he could see the value of the course, not just in maths, he could take it
further, which was..[important].
FACILITATOR: You mentioned something about one of your learners going on to do some work as well?
PRACTITIONER 4: Yes, he’s got an aspiration... He’s desperate for his job, it’s quite..you know...
that green shirt is something quite sort after and he's come from no formal education,
no formal examinations. He could take a degree in maths, easily.
And he’s found that through that scheme. But, yeah, I'm so proud of him.
PRACTITIONER 1: That would be good, because, you know, I've got very enthusiastic mentors – and
it's a shame if they’re released and then don’t do anything with it. What a waste of a talent!
SESSION LEADER: I’ve heard of prisons having really difficult decisions to make when prisoners
are leaving – do they get to take the t-shirt with them? It’s tricky!
[The practitioners laugh]
There is actually, and I don’t know whether this was in position when you started getting involved in it,
but we’ve now developed just a little handout which describes the kind of volunteering opportunities
that people might be able to take up outside. For which, take the t-shirt with you, you know?
PRACTITIONER 3: Then we’ve got fairly long term stays, not quite as long as yours, a
fraction of that. And they come from a variety of different backgrounds.
PRACTITIONER 1: I’m just going to start a new group now in Grendon, which is a closed
prison. And they’re very long term prisoners, so hopefully we’ll get some really good
trained mentors. For me it’s important that they flag up the maths on the wing, because we have great
difficulty getting men to come up. Because their sentence is so long,
they can’t see the point. It’s not as though they’re just coming out. So I'm
hoping we will keep mentors for a bit longer, and really flag up [that] maths is important
on the wing.
PRACTITIONER 3: Something else that’s kind of of interesting, [an] observation, would be
quite often we'll see with mentors, I think it's more to do with the, you know, what that...sort of...
the mentoring position does for their self-esteem and how they behave differently
when they put that shirt on.
SESSION LEADER: I’ve got a quote from one of
the guys I interviewed after he’d been mentoring for a couple of months,
and I said to him something like, you know, this is one of the mentors,
"What do you get out of being a mentor?"
and he just went quiet for a bit and he said, you know, I haven’t got the quote quite right,
but it was something like, and it’s in the book, something like...
"when I get up in the morning and I’m thinking, what am I going to do today?
I think, well that’s at least that’s one good thing I can do."
And I [thought] "Yes!" Fantastic.