For Guardians: What You Are Agreeing To When You Approve Mentoring

A message arrives asking you to approve mentoring for a young person in your care. Before you decide, you should know exactly what you are agreeing to, including the parts where the honest answer is that we do not do that.

What mentoring here is

A mentor is an adult with experience in a field your child is curious about. They talk about subject choices, programmes, applications, and what a job is actually like once you have it.

Some of that happens in one-to-one sessions, some in group sessions, and some through Ask a Mentor, where a student posts a question and a mentor answers it without a session being booked.

Mentoring is free for students. Mentors are volunteers and are not paid for it.

What mentoring is not

Four things it is not, because most disappointment with mentoring comes from expecting one of them:

Not tutoring. A mentor is not there to teach the syllabus, set homework or mark it.
Not counselling or therapy. If a young person needs mental health support, mentoring is not a substitute for it, and no mentor should pretend otherwise.
Not a job offer or a place anywhere. A mentor can describe a route and what it takes. They cannot open it.
Not supervision. A mentor is not responsible for your child's schoolwork, attendance or behaviour.

What it costs

Nothing. Mentoring is free for students, and mentors are not paid.

That means nobody on this platform has any reason to ask your child for money, bank details, or a payment of any kind at any point. If a request like that ever appears, it is not a misunderstanding. Treat it as a reason to stop and report it.

What we check before anyone is matched

Every mentor is verified before being matched with a student. Verification covers identity, references, and a review of the experience they say they have. Mentors must be at least 21.

No student under 18 is matched until a guardian has approved it. That is what the request you received is. It is a gate, not a formality, and nothing starts without it.

Everything stays on the platform

Mentoring happens on eStudent360. Mentors are not permitted to move a student to a personal phone number, a social media account, or a private chat.

That single rule carries more weight than any other, because it means:

there is a record of what was said, rather than one person's memory of it
a request to move the conversation elsewhere is itself against the rules, whatever reason is given for it
reporting a concern is possible, because the conversation is somewhere it can be looked at

Say this to your child in plain words: if a mentor asks to talk somewhere else, the answer is no, and tell me. They will not be in trouble for it, and they do not have to be polite about it.

What you will see, and what you will not

Your approval is required, and mentoring cannot begin without it. You can withdraw it. You can raise a concern at any point, and so can your child.

The most reliable window into how mentoring is going is not a screen. It is your child. Ask them. Five minutes after a session tells you more than any report would.

Questions worth asking after the first session

Who is this person, and what do they do?
What did you ask them?
What did they say that you were not expecting?
Did anything make you uncomfortable?
What are you supposed to do before the next one?

That last one matters more than it looks. Mentoring that never produces a next action tends to drift, and then quietly stop.

What a mentor should and should not be asked to do

Your child can reasonably ask a mentor almost anything about the work: what it pays at the start, what the worst part of the job is, whether they nearly failed, whether they would do it again, what they got wrong.

Those are the questions mentoring is for, and a mentor who cannot answer them honestly is not much use.

What a mentor should decline, and what you should expect them to decline:

writing an essay, a personal statement or coursework rather than commenting on a draft
giving medical, legal or financial advice
promising a place, a job, an internship or an introduction
taking on the role of a counsellor when a young person needs actual support

If your child comes back with a mentor's promise of a placement or a job, treat it with caution and tell us. Mentors are here to describe routes, not to hand them out.

What good looks like after a month

Your child can say what the mentor's job actually involves, not just its title.
They have asked something they would have been embarrassed to ask you.
Something small has been done: entry requirements looked up, a draft written, one more person contacted, two programmes compared properly.
Sessions happen at times that do not wreck homework or sleep.

What does not look good: sessions repeatedly cancelled, conversation that stays encouraging and never becomes specific, or a mentor who mostly talks about themselves.

If it is not working, say so. A match that is polite and useless is worth ending, and ending it is not an insult to anyone.

Signals to stop and report

Stop the conversation and report it if a mentor:

asks to move to a personal number, personal email, social account or private chat
asks for money, a fee, a favour, or offers a gift
asks for photographs, a home address, financial details or passwords
asks your child to keep any part of the conversation from you
suggests meeting in person

Any one of these is enough on its own. You do not need to be certain, and you are not being difficult. Mentoring here is online and stays online, so there is no legitimate reason for any of the above to come up.

Practical things worth agreeing at home

When. Fix session times that do not collide with homework or sleep. Thirty to forty-five minutes is usually plenty.
Where. Somewhere in the house where the conversation is not a secret.
What happens if a session is missed. Agree in advance who tells whom, so a missed session does not quietly become the end of the mentoring.
What is being worked on. If your child can state the goal in one sentence, the mentoring has a shape. If they cannot, help them find one before the next session.

If you would rather say no, or not yet

Not approving is a legitimate answer, and so is waiting.

If the reason is that you do not know enough, ask before you decide. Read what the mentor's profile says about their field and experience. Ask your child what they are actually hoping to get out of it. Ask us anything the profile does not answer.

If the reason is that you disagree with the direction your child is taking, mentoring is a strange place to fight that battle. A mentor who genuinely does the work is more likely than anyone else to tell your child what the route really costs, including the parts that might change their mind. Blocking the conversation mostly guarantees the decision gets made on worse information.

If the reason is timing, say that plainly. Exams, a house move, a difficult term at school: all of these are good reasons to start in two months rather than now. The request will still be there.

What is worth avoiding is approving without reading anything, then discovering three weeks later that you do not know who your child has been talking to.

Approving once is not the whole job

Approval is the start of something you are part of, even though you are not in the sessions. Ask every few weeks. Ask what changed. Ask whether the mentor is still the right person, because interests move and a match that fitted in March may not fit in July.

If your child wants to stop, let them stop. Nothing here should feel like an obligation they cannot get out of.

Why we ask this much

The rules above are cheap to write and expensive to run. We keep them because the alternative is a place where an adult can talk privately to a child with nobody checking, and that is not worth building.

Verification, the minimum age of 21, your approval, and keeping conversations on the platform are the reasons a mentor can be trusted with the questions your child would rather not ask you.

If you are still unsure, the right answer is to wait. Read the mentor's profile. Ask us. Approve when you are ready, not because a message is sitting in your inbox.