Where We’re Starting From

What we have done is start the way we think a tutoring and mentoring organisation should start: by asking young people and families what they actually need before deciding what to deliver.

Listening Before Delivery

In our voice capture session, five young people chose the issue that mattered most to them: nothing to offer in the area, and nowhere to go. Working through our four wellbeing themes, they placed it under Feeling Good rather than treating it as a simple boredom complaint. Two things they said have stayed with us: workshops would help them build skills, and having a safe space to go to would change their week. What they asked for wasn’t entertainment. It was somewhere to learn something practical and work out what they’re actually interested in.

We also ran a showcase at the RCCG The Fountain Father’s Day BBQ in Barking on 20 June 2026, where we spoke directly with parents about what their children need most. Using the same scorecard we use to assess and prioritise places on our programmes, we asked parents to tell us, in their own words, where the gap actually is. Science came up more than any other subject, more than any other single answer we heard that day.

How We Measure Impact

Our Scorecard: How We Decide Who We Support

Every young person referred to one of our programmes is assessed using the same three-part scorecard, whether they come to us through a school, a church contact, a Holiday Activity and Food programme referral, or a parent asking directly.

• It confirms eligibility: the right age, living in one of the three boroughs we cover, with proper consent in place.
• It checks that our support is actually the right fit: mentoring or tutoring, not something that needs a school, a GP or a social worker instead.
• It scores need against a small set of indicators, so a place goes to whoever needs it most, not whoever asked first or loudest.

How We’ll Measure What Happens Next

Before we deliver a single session, we’ve already decided how we’ll know if it’s working, and we’ve built that discipline in from the start rather than adding it later for a funder’s benefit.

Every young person is assessed at the start and end of their time with us, using validated tools chosen for the programme: the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire for mentoring, and a structured readiness self-assessment for programmes focused on academic confidence and study skills. These aren’t tools we invented to make a report look good. They’re the same instruments schools and researchers use.

We also set a meaningful-dose threshold for every programme, the minimum level of attendance below which we don’t count a change in someone’s scores as a real result of what we did, rather than something that would have happened anyway. And we report a completion rate alongside our outcome data, not just an attendance figure, so what you see here reflects what genuinely happened, not the most flattering number available.

Our first cohort data will be published here as soon as we have it. Our full measurement methodology is available to download now.