10th November 2021
On Friday 5 November, the first session of our mentoring programme got under way at Bridge Learning Campus with a buzz fit for bonfire night.
Eleven excited and fully trained St Brendan’s students were raring to go, armed with enthusiasm, mentoring strategies, booklets, skills matrixes and a lot of doughnuts.
Once all mentors were matched with their two mentees from Year 7 at Bridge Learning, the room was filled with laughing, chatting and a wonderful positive energy. Both mentors and mentees seemed to be very keen to reach out to make new friends from across the age ranges and different parts of the city .
Our St Brendan’s mentors worked on learning skills with their mentees, working out where their learning strengths and weaknesses are and they helped them choose a book that will really stoke their enthusiasm for reading for fun.
One of our mentors, Phoebe coincidentally was matched with two Harry Potter enthusiasts, which could not have gone any better for Phoebe who is herself a huge Potter fan. It looks like mentors and mentees are set for some good conversations ahead!
Everyone managed to find an exciting new book to order and helped themselves to a doughnut before setting a small and achievable target for their mentee and ending the session.
It was a very positive start for our team of mentors as Assistant Head Teacher Elizabeth Hackling commented ‘The mentors are brilliant!'
The mentors were trained back in September with the amazing coaching professionals at PwC and now that we’ve made such a good start, we hope that the next nine weeks will see real progress for mentees (and mentors) in their personal confidence and leadership skills.
The final week will see every mentee talk with the Head Teacher at Bridge Learning about their book.
