Peer Mentorship Project, Peterborough

This project has now ended

Click here to read details of our celebration event in Peterborough in July 2007

"Peer Mentorship: promoting advocacy and friendships between young people" is an article about this project that has been published in the Learning Disability Today journal Volume 7, Issue 3, August 2007 (Foundation for People with Learning Disabilities / Pavilion)

LG2 influenced our further friendship and peer mentorship work which has been funded by Peterborough and Cambridgeshire Connexions and Lloyds TSB for the academic year 2006/2007. The main objectives of this project are:

• To provide opportunities in curriculum time for disabled and non-disabled young people to be together, taking part in activities, and for each student to build their own person centred portfolio
• For friendships to develop and opportunities for social interaction to take place between students outside of the facilitated sessions
• For the non-disabled young people to undertake a training programme in Communication, disability awareness and advocacy/mentorship, which will equip them to assist their disabled peers in building their portfolios and in various situations including reviews and interviews
• For school staff to have an increased awareness of person centred approaches and the importance of friendships between disabled and non-disabled young people
• To receive accreditation for this work from an external organisation

The response from students to this project has been amazing and the feedback we have received has been fantastic. It is evident as weeks progress that relationships are developing and students are gaining in confidence.

Some of the comments:

“Circles Network is awesome. Working with the group at Phoenix has been so much fun and so rewarding. My perspectives have completely changed. I’m looking forward to doing activities with LG2 and getting to know Michelle better"                               

“Changed my perspective and making me a better person. Very rewarding, I love it so much!!!”

What has been really  touching is that students are all so comfortable around each other and so accepting of difference.

One girl who has been exceptionally committed to the project handed me a package over Christmas, asking me to pass it on to A’s family. She had paired up with A for the work in school and there was a real rapport between them. A cannot see and relies on touch and sound as his main senses.

She showed me a Christmas card which she had made for A and which involved lots of tactile bits stuck to it, and she said that although she knew A would not be able to see the card she had made it as sensory as possible so he would enjoy touching it with his hands. She also gave him a present of some of his favourite objects to hold and feel.

The time and effort she had gone to was remarkable and showed how highly she thought of A.

Through our work with this project we were awarded the Approved Provider Standard from the Mentoring and Befriending Foundation in November 2007.

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Last modified: February 05, 2008