Seeing mentoring as a system, not a service
How a new approach to evaluation revealed mentoring as part of a wider ecosystem of support for young people across London.
Evaluating mentoring across London
The Centre for Public Impact partnered with the Greater London Authority to evaluate mentoring programmes funded through the £34 million New Deal for Young People fund.
The goal was to understand how mentoring supports young Londoners’ wellbeing, skills, and opportunities, and how it connects with the wider network of services and support around them.
Mentoring works across relationships and systems
Mentoring rarely happens in isolation. It is inside a wider network that includes education, housing, mental health support, community networks, and employment pathways.
Change often happens through small, relational shifts shaped by these wider environments, rather than through a single intervention or moment of support.
Why conventional evaluation misses what matters
Many evaluations look for clear, linear results. While that works in some settings, mentoring is relational and non-linear.
Important changes like trust, belonging, and confidence, as well as the influence of other services that shape young people’s lives, are difficult to capture with standard metrics, meaning much of the real story stays hidden.
Rethinking evaluation: learning from lived experience
To address these challenges, CPI used a transformative evaluation approach that centres lived experience and explores the wider support system.
Instead of asking whether mentoring works, we focused on understanding what changes, for whom, and why that matters.
The work included:
- Storytelling interviews
- Peer-led research
- Journey mapping
- Collaborative workshops
Crucially, evidence was interpreted together with young people, mentors, and delivery partners. This helped show how mentoring contributes across services and how change unfolds over time, rather than attributing outcomes to a single programme.
What this means for government and public services
Public services don’t operate alone, yet evaluations often treat them that way.
This work shows how governments can build evidence that reflects how people actually experience services. By centring lived experience and shared learning, transformative evaluation supports:
- More responsive policy design
- Better funding decisions
- Stronger coordination across services
It helps systems learn, not just measure.
What people told us
“Youth participation means more than opening the door to young people – it requires us to continuously adapt our approach to create spaces where young people feel genuinely welcomed, empowered to speak up, and inspired to lead.”
Explore the resources
Dive into the full collection of NDYP evaluation resources to see how mentoring contributes to wellbeing, skills, and wider systems change. You’ll find:
- Case studies
- Peer research
- Learning reports
- Practical tools
Start with the Storytelling Toolkit, a simple and adaptable way to capture relational and system-level change.
Interested in using transformative evaluation in your organisation or public service? Get in touch to learn how CPI supports teams to design people-centred evaluation and learning.
