Introducing our Pro Mentors

Families

14 Sept

For the academic year 2023-2024, we have six amazing pro mentors ready to support you.

These mentors represent the best of what we're trying to achieve at Oppidan: full time, committed for the long term, bags of experience and ready to help your child achieve their dreams.

At Oppidan there are two types of mentors: freelance and professional.

Freelance mentors often have full time jobs outside of Oppidan and work with us for their shared passion in supporting young people and helping them develop the skills necessary for a successful future.

What are pro mentors?

Our pro mentor team, currently 6-strong, are the mainstay of our families and schools offering. They are the reason parents and schools return to work with us, time and time again.

Pro mentors are contracted, on ‘payroll’ employees dedicated to working with Oppidan for up to 50 hours per month. They commit for a full year, often more, and each has their own small handful of families and school programmes they nurture and support.

What are the benefits of having a pro mentor?

1. Consistency

One of the biggest problems with the tuition industry is the inconsistency and ‘short term’ nature of the help. Mentoring doesn’t and couldn’t work like that. Our pro mentors are contracted to work with us for at least a year. They’re dedicated to making a real impact in a consistent way. As the evidence and research demonstrates, 1:1 academic mentoring is only effective when conducted consistently over an extended time period.

2. Training

Having pro mentors on contract means we have much more time to upskill them. We can provide better resources and training and give them continual support to make the most of their mentoring sessions. They have more time for reporting and session planning. This isn’t ‘past paper in the back of your pocket’ style stuff. Indeed, more often than not, our pro mentors are already trained teachers or have worked in the education sector in different contexts. They're ‘pros’ in more ways than one.

3. Longevity

Given our pro mentors commit for at least a year of work, we can curate and design mentoring programmes around specific individuals. As it’s the relationship between mentor and mentee that makes all the difference, we have mentors we can rely on. That means we can make our work more bespoke, more targeted and more impactful. A student struggling in September can be paired with a pro mentor confident in the knowledge they’ll still be there when the big scary exams roll around in June.

4. Schools and Families

As our work grows across both schools and private families our pro mentors are encouraged to allow both contexts to cross-pollinate. Oppidan is uniquely placed to be working in so many of the UK’s leading schools, in both the private and state sector. Learnings made in the school context can be consolidated, shared with the team and then transferred into work with families, and vice versa. None of our work happens in a silo and having pro mentors ensures there is a stronger bond between the two sides of our work. They are our spokespeople on the ground and committed to sharing the value of mentoring with parents, teachers and students alike.