The National Mentoring Standards ensure best practice in mentoring across the UK and internationally, using a self-assessment framework of standards to assess the quality of the mentoring programme. This gives organisations the opportunity to benchmark themselves against the set of standards, to enable high quality mentoring programmes to be delivered.
Currently poor-quality mentoring programmes are not differentiated from high quality impactful mentoring programmes. Therefore, the quality and reliability of mentoring is being affected by the lack of standardised mentoring standards. Some basic guidance exists, for example for doctors within parts of the NHS and for mentoring young children in school. There is a risk caused by this lack of conceptual frameworks which translates onto the schemes themselves, where evidence-based outcome focused mentoring schemes are compared against schemes where mentors are untrained, lacking supervision, making up mentoring processes or causing poor or negative outcomes.
Organisations who want to add credibility to their mentoring programme and be accredited to meet nationally recognised standards. Whether it’s a formal or informal programme, new or established programme the (NMS) will ensure your programme meets our evidence-based high standards of best practice, policy, ethos and culture.
The standards were developed over 10 years based on existing research and evidence for mentoring best practice; a mentoring survey, from a leading mentoring provider, amongst consultations with large and small mentoring organisations, leading universities, professional and academic mentoring programme leads and Government support. Finally, a focus group reviewed the standards to ensure fitness for purpose.
The National Mentoring Standard are divided into 7 sections (Pillars) upon which benchmarking can be based and include the following:
