Can you bottle a good relationship? Learning about mentoring in the Talent Match programme

The Centre for Youth Impact, supported by Big Lottery Fund, is delighted to present our report from one year of working with the Talent Match partnerships to learn about quality in mentoring relationships. Talent Match is a five-year, £108 million investment by the Big Lottery Fund to tackle youth unemployment. The programme is delivered by cross-sector partnerships in 21 areas across England, supporting young people aged 18-24 furthest from the labour market.

This report explores quality in developmental relationships from the perspective of the young person’s experience. It acknowledges the power that relationships can hold for those that experience them, and that for many people the individual, flexible and organic nature of these relationships sits at odds to traditional methods of measuring quality and impact.

We intend that this report will be a tool for anyone interested in how relationships work as a mechanism for change within services and programmes, and how we might understand and improve quality in these relationships. You can download the report here.