The Brightside Trust (www.thebrightsidetrust.org) is an educational charity committed to helping underprivileged individuals to overcome social disadvantage. Working in partnership with government, corporate and not-for-profit organisations, Brightside delivers e-mentoring and internet-based programmes that raise the aspirations of young people and adults, enabling them to continue in education and training, and achieve meaningful careers. Brightside has developed a scalable model enabling e-mentoring to be a cost-effective, long-term intervention which has supported over 4000 young people from 700 schools, working with over 40 universities across the UK. These students have benefited from the advice and guidance of mentors from the fields of medicine, healthcare, engineering, law, business, chemistry and physics. E-mentoring builds on the widely recognised benefits of face-to-face mentoring without the pressures of time and distance. Communicating electronically is an especially powerful tool for sustaining motivation levels and providing personalised follow-up to supplement one-off or regular face-to-face activities. The role of a mentor in sustaining motivation, building confidence and self-belief cannot be underestimated. Brightside’s unique e-mentoring approach combines top-level security with a well structured range of tailored features and resources that encourage mentees to explore specific challenges with their mentors. The Brightside Trust, in partnership with The Other Media (www.othermedia.com) were commissioned to design and support a web-site to allow secure access to weblog journals or ‘blogging’. ‘Blogging’ is a term used to refer to the continual updating of an on-line personal journal or diary that other users can access and comment on. An experienced team provides a bespoke service with full programme management including: • design and implementation • training materials, support and resources • ongoing monitoring • web support all aimed at ensuring high levels of mentee and mentor engagement. In addition, we have developed a scalable model that enables our e-mentoring to be a cost-effective long-term intervention.
Policy Context
The Brightside Trust is constituted under a trust deed dated 16 February 2000 and is a UK registered charity (Number 1080243). The trust was established with the aim of creating educational and training opportunities for the able, but disadvantaged, by whatever circumstances, family or environmental. Objectives and activities The Brightside Trust's vision is a world where no one is excluded from achieving their dream by poverty or disadvantage. Brightside exists to help disadvantaged individuals by working to raise their achievement levels and by reducing the social barriers to their success. Brightside’s approach is to select a target group of socially disadvantaged individuals and to develop new programmes over a two to three year period to help advance the development of these individuals. The aim is to develop the programmes to become self-sufficient and run with partner organisations. The long term aim of the charity is to create and sustain a whole portfolio of programmes which reflect the change of different interests and capabilities of the individuals the charity exists to help. The initial process of designing the Brightside Trust e-mentoring websites was to provide a solution for a recognised issue around disadvantaged young people accessing information and advice about attending University to study medicine. This was seen to be part of the Widening Participation Agenda of the UK Government, hence the funding from Higher Education Funding Council of England and AimHigher. The online mentoring was used as a way of bringing together groups of people, with diverse schedules and locations. Online mentoring allows young people to talk to mentors with different backgrounds, from University undergraduates to Senior Managers in Corporate Business.
Description of target users and groups
The target group for Brightside e-mentoring activities are disadvantaged or disaffected young people below the age 30 who - live in areas of social deprivation identified by the UK Government (Indices of Multiple Deprivation 2007), - receive education maintenance grants - are from single parent families - are eligible for free school meals - are the first generation to attend higher education - attend a school identified as a disadvantaged institution - are progressing below their assessed educational potential - live in a household where the main wage earner is UK National Statistics Socio-economic classification (NS-SEC ) 4-8
Description of the way to implement the initiative
The Brightside Trust applies PRINCE 2 Project Management methodology to all projects undertaken by the Charity which includes the development of project research and proposals, budgeting, project initiation documents, project implementation plans, project reviewing structures, with monthly reports and evaluation The online mentoring sites are published and maintained by The Brightside Trust in association with The Other Media (www.othermedia.com). The projects are managed by an experienced Project Manager from within The Brightside Trust. Brightside also provide Web Editing facilities, technical support and training of the participants in the project. The day to day running of the project, identification, training and matching of mentors and mentees is performed by the project co-ordinator from within partner organisations. All participating mentors undergo security check including a Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) Disclosure check.
Technology solution
The initial process of designing the Brightside Trust e-mentoring websites was to provide a solution for a recognised issue around disadvantaged young people accessing information and advice about attending University. The online mentoring was used as a way of bringing together groups of people, with diverse schedules and locations. The website includes security and confidentiality features as standard. It uses secure servers which are built with e-commerce and privacy in mind. The system uses its own secure communication framework in which all passwords and communications are encrypted between browsers and servers, and the website is hosted in a highly secure data centre that allows named and authorised access only. All communications are filtered to look for offensive or abusive language, profanities, e-mail addresses and mobile phone numbers. Any transgressions are ‘paused’ in the system, both Project Coordinators and Website Administrators are notified. The message is assessed and appropriate action can be taken. In addition to the automated checking processes, communications are randomly assessed and read by human eye (Website Administrators, Brightside and partner HEI staff) to ensure quality of the process. If a participant receives an inappropriate communication they have the opportunity to report it individually.
Technology choice: Standards-based technology, Accessibility-compliant (minimum WAI AA)Main results, benefits and impacts
In a recent published evaluation of ‘Bright Journals’, a project linking young people, with an interest studying medicine or allied healthcare subjects at university, with undergraduate medical students, 66% of the young people rated the ease of using the online mentoring system as ‘Excellent‘. In addition 58% found the experience very rewarding and 39% found it ‘quite’ rewarding. 75% of the participants considered ‘Bright Journals’ to be a good way of learning more about health-related careers. Recent evaluation results over two academic years clearly demonstrates that for mentees who engaged with the Future Blogs programme found it effective at providing the support and encouragement that students need to be able to make informed choices about school, university life and career choices. Overall 74% of mentees were more interested to study chemistry or the chemical sciences in the future, with the greatest improvement seen in the second academic year for 16-18 year old students, for whom there was a 43% increase. In addition, 72% of mentees who were the first generation to enter HE, reported that communicating with their mentor had inspired them to think about going in to HE. The e-mentoring experience was regarded extremely highly with 98% of mentees stating they would recommend Future Blogs to a sibling, 86% reporting that they were happy with the e-mentoring experience and 83% of mentees rating the website as Good or Excellent. An interim evaluation of the Live Journals pilot has indicated that it has had a positive effect on a mentees confidence and motivation, their aspirations to HE and their decisions to study engineering after GCSE. From an initial baseline survey of mentees who had been mentored for a period of up to six months, an increase was demonstrated in their confidence in their abilities (+25%) and their motivation for school work (+27%). The majority of mentees also reported that communicating with their mentor had inspired them to think about going in to HE. Notably the greatest e-mentoring improvement was seen for 16-18 year old students who reported that they were more likely to study for an A or AS level including science or maths or consider a BTEC in engineering. The e-mentoring experience was regarded extremely highly with 100% rating the website as Good or Excellent and 94% would recommend Live Journals to a sibling or friend
Return on investment
Return on investment: Not applicable / Not availableTrack record of sharing
Brightside’s first e-mentoring website, Bright Journals, was piloted in 2003/4 in partnership with Imperial College London and Guy’s King’s and St. Thomas’ Medical School (GKT) who helped recruit, train and support undergraduates willing to act as role models and mentors. Bright Journals is now a self-financing scheme. Brightside has formed partnerships with the Royal Society of Chemistry, Institute of Physics and the Royal Academy of Engineering to establish projects focused on the sciences. We have recently developed a new selection of projects which focus on supporting young people in care and disadvantaged young people wishing to follow a career in Law. The projects build on Brightside’s learnings from Bright Journals to help other organisations use e-mentoring to achieve their aims. Brightside regularly present project finding and evaluations at conference and seminars across the UK including the Mentoring and Befriending Foundation National Conference, regional and national workshops of Aim Higher and Higher Education Funding Council for England. We have also been asked to apply for the Approved provider Standard National Strategic framework for mentoring and befriending based on the innovation and unique approach to supporting disadvantaged young people. In 2007, Brightside received a 5 star rating in the New Media Awards (Education Category) and were Runners up in the London Education Partnership Awards. We have also been invited to contribute to a publication highlighting good practice in e-mentoring. This is due to be published in early 2009. In terms of Europe, we have placed case studies on the ePractice website and we have hosted meetings within Brightside with colleagues interested in mentoring from Holland. We have close links with the EQUAL-Works project - Audio-Visual Entrepreneurship Development Programme who worked in transnational partnership with Etnische Ondernemers in de Media in the Netherlands, Pluriel Media in France and Equal Partner HB in Sweden.
Lessons learnt
The main lessons learnt as part of the project are system structure, development of local support and mentee and mentor engagement. With nature of the e-mentoring project and the range of projects and subjects it is very important to provide training and support to all participants. As an organisation we provide training for mentors and mentees. However, early on it became obvious to Brightside that to provide the appropriate support we needed to train local co-ordinators in the use of the system, provision of mentor and mentee training and skills associated with monitoring conversations. We now identify and train, with our partners, suitable local co-ordinators who are aware of local needs and issues, while understanding the local educational networks (primary schools, secondary schools, further and higher education institutions) training and employment opportunities. We have developed an excellent monitoring system to assess the number of interactions between young people and their mentors. If we feel the relationships are not fully engaging, we encourage young people to contact their mentor and vice versa by using a range of interventions including SMS, sending emails to registered email address or contacting local project co-ordinators. Initially, all our projects have been run as individual websites. This presented the management team with a challenge to update and monitor all the sites. To address this we developed a new, fully integrated system, which replaces the need to ‘clone’ each new website. We now have only 4 websites – Bright Conversation, Bright Knowledge, Bright Training and Bright Network. In conjunction to this we developed a tagging system (permissions structure) for participants to identify which project participants are linked to, and what information they can see when log on. This has led to a more efficient system, but more importantly a system which is scalable.
Scope: Local (city or municipality), National