GUIDANCE FOR MENTORING SCHEMES
4.0 Mentoring
4.1 Reported mentoring is when the organisation recruits participants to a mentoring scheme managed by a coordinator who provides support for the mentoring partnership, provides learning and development for both mentors and mentees and monitors and evaluates the quality and impact of the scheme. In addition, all mentoring that is part of a structured scheme in the University works with the framework of roles and responsibilities outlined here.
4.2 Roles and responsibilities
In reported mentoring schemes, in addition to the mentor and mentee, there will be a scheme co-ordinator with a series of responsibilities for the day-to-day operation of the scheme and a scheme sponsor who will have oversight of the scheme and has a monitoring role. The responsibilities for these roles are set out below and the level of support and guidance provided by a scheme sponsor and / or coordinator will be determined by the needs of the particular mentoring scheme.
4.2.1 What a scheme sponsor does is to:
• Establish the purpose of the mentoring scheme and provide terms of reference for the scheme. This may include clarifying the boundaries of the scheme.
• Identify who the scheme is targeted at – both mentees and mentors – and identify how mentoring will help individuals and the wider benefits sought.
• Establish appropriate scheme management and administration, including clarification of the role of the scheme co-ordinator.
• Work with the scheme co-ordinator to establish selection / nomination criteria to assure a level of quality in the approach to mentoring. In some mentoring schemes the mentors may be allocated / invited to be mentors. For other mentoring schemes mentoring may be a voluntary activity. In the latter case, the scheme will need to be communicated to potential mentors with information about how mentors can apply and find out more about the scheme.
• Work with the scheme co-ordinator to establish how the scheme will be reviewed to assess impact, ensuring that confidence in the scheme is not compromised and that the outcomes can be reviewed without breaching the principle of confidentiality. This includes identifying the measures to be used, how to capture the outcomes for mentees and mentors and how to assess the impact of the scheme and the benefits to the university. For some schemes a longitudinal evaluation may be used to assess the benefits and impact over time.
• Provide a clear process for mentees to raise any concerns or formal complaints.
• Determine how many mentees the scheme will be able to resource / needs to resource, and how much time a mentee will need to invest in the mentoring relationship.
• Determine how many mentors are needed / are available and how much time mentors will need to contribute.
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