In the 1990s the Labour government introduced a role called the Learning Mentor with subsidised training. In late 2014, Richard realised that the training had been abolished when the coalition government had come to power in 2010. He vowed to resolve this, and ran his first Children’s Mentor course in Brighton in January 2015. After a few months, the team found that other organisations supporting older young people requested training. Richard then researched and developed other versions of mentor training, finally resulting in over ten sector specific mentor courses. In 2017, Richard worked with the awarding organisation Open Awards to write specialist mentoring qualifications at level 3 initially, with levels 4 and 1 coming over the following years. You can visit the website at www.thementoringschool.com
