MENTORING for vulnerable children who have experience of the care system is to become a permanent feature in schools in Scotland's largest city.
An independent review of a scheme run by the charity MCR Pathways in Glasgow secondary schools during the past three years found that it had a "significant" positive impact on children and young people who receive it.
The project pairs young people up with a life coach from outside the education system who can pass on advice and prepare them for life after school.
The review, carried out by social researchers ScotCen said that mentoring had helped pupils improve their grades and had increased in the number going on to university, college or into employment by more than a quarter.
READ MORE: Why we must change doomed fate of our care-experienced young people
MCR Pathways currently provides mentors to more than 2,300 young people across Scotland and operates in secondary schools in Aberdeenshire, Aberdeen, Clackmannanshire, Edinburgh, North Ayrshire, South Lanarkshire, Shetland and West Dunbartonshire as well as Glasgow.
Maureen McKenna, Executive Director of Education, Glasgow City Council said: “This programme works because we have embedded it within our core business and complements the work of our teacher and school staff – nurturing and empowering our most vulnerable young people to believe in themselves regardless of their circumstances."
Annemarie O’Donnell, Chief Executive of Glasgow City Council, said: “To me, as corporate parent to every vulnerable child and young person in our city, the only thing that matters is that we do everything in our collective power to nurture, support and create opportunities that will help them flourish.
"The research is clear in demonstrating our mentored young people are staying in school longer and achieving more qualifications leading to increased options for work, further and higher education. This will unequivocally improve the life chances of these young people."
READ MORE: Life-changing mentoring programme keeps children in school for longer
MCR Founder Iain MacRitchie said: “We are hugely encouraged by the conclusions of the independent care review. The MCR mentoring programme is already delivering and making a profound difference to the life-chances of our young people.
"It is fantastic to have MCR permanently embedded in every secondary school in Glasgow. We just want to reach every care experienced young person across the country.
"Mentoring matters to both education outcomes, and confidence and wellbeing."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here