Discussion+of+Younger+and+Warrington's+study

Mike Younger and Molly Warrington undertook a study into mentoring in the United Kingdom. Their study titled // Mentoring and target-setting in a secondary school in England: an evaluation of aims and benefits // was published in the Oxford Review of Education Vol 35, No 2, April 2009. While this study may have been undertaken in England in a 11 – 16 school it is relevant to the school where this program is being developed in Victoria, Australia. This study looked at the impact of mentoring on GCSE students in a ‘...metropolitan local authority in Northern England.’ (p. 170) It ‘...[serves] a socially and geographically mixed – but almost monoculturally white – catchment area’. This sounds similar to the school involved in the implementation of this mentoring program. ‘The urban parts of the catchment contain areas of significant social deprivation and exclusion, with a legacy of low aspirations within the parental community’. Our school does not have ‘significant social deprivation and exclusion’ however there is anecdotally ‘low aspirations within the parent community’. It is not uncommon for students to say they want to go to university but have no idea what this means or how to achieve this aim. Nor it is unusually for students to have little idea of what to do once at ‘university’. For many they see this as the next step, something which just happens like the movement from primary to secondary education. The other major difference between this study and the current school is the age of the students. The school in the study is a 11 – 16 school with a focus on GCSE students and their results. After the GCSEs students either move down a technical pathway or an academic pathway. Given that we are still looking at students last two years of education before they move onto TAFE(technical pathway) or university(academic pathway) GCSE can be viewed in a similar light. GCSE results in England are very important for student pathways after high school. ‘This [study was] based on interviews...’ with students who had been part of the program. These students were able to articulate some unforseen issues with mentoring to which I will return later. The use of student interviews coupled with the data of improved results gives an authority to this study. Younger and Warrington first looked at the students Key Stage 3 examination results as a predictor of how students would perform during their GCSE examination. Here we can use students NAPLAN results at Year 9 to gather the same sort of information. The data from this school suggested that the ‘value-added data ... [was] positive.’ It is important to note, as Younger and Warrington, do that ‘...it is not possible to be definitive about the precise impact of mentoring and target-setting on achievement, since a number of concomitant changes had taken place within the school...’. Likewise it is going to be hard to measure the ‘real’ difference a mentoring program will make at the Melbourne school as the school is undergoing a ‘change in culture’ therefore any increase in student performance could be attributed to a range of programs not just the mentoring program. The school at the centre of Younger and Warrington’s study increased their percentage of students achieving five or move A*- C grades at GCSE between 1997 – 2005 from approximately 34% for boys and 42% for girls to 78% for girls and 82% for boys. This is a significant increase and one which we would be looking for. However the data that we collect in the first instance will only be over 18 months. The real benefit of this program will, like the school in Northern England, come about over a period of three to five years. What is interesting about the study is the student voice. Students, both those who when onto the sixth form college and those who continued on to further education state that the mentors ‘helped [them] plan through the work, ... planning things carefully... keeping a clear head’. Mentors also helped students gain self believe and motivation. This is what we are looking for from our program. It is this that we are looking to instil in our students. However, Younger and Warrington have made some important observations regarding the program. Firstly that many mentoring programs goals are ‘...frequently ambitious and wide ranging’ and secondary that for some of the students the good work done during mentoring decreased once they had left the program. This was an unforseen issue with the mentoring program and one not considered when we decided on the focus of this research. However now that we are aware of it we are just adding another factor that could be addressed in follow up interviews. Australia, like England, has a government which is focused on improving the number of students who continue their education as the society ore towards a more “knowledge based economy”. For this reason the question put forward by Younger and Warrington ‘...has mentoring been more narrowly focused and directed to short-term objectives, simply defined in terms of raising the percentage of students achieving benchmark grades at GCSE?’ is worthy of consideration before implementing a mentoring program at our college. While there is a clear goal of improving our VCE outcomes, and it is true this is the easy piece of data to measure, it is also true that part of our focus is to improve students understanding of themselves.
 * Discussion of Mike Younger and Molly Warrington study // Mentoring and target-setting in a secondary school in England: an evaluation of aims and benefits. //   **