A good idea that reflects badly on our society

How sad we have a society so incapable of nurturing its children that strangers have to step in

Who could argue with the idea that mentors work? Socrates mentored Plato, Joyce mentored Beckett, Russell mentored Wittgenstein. So the list goes on. History is littered with such partnerships – of older, experienced successes moulding younger people's talent and their willingness to learn. The younger, by the nature of the relationship, gains most extravagantly from the older, but both lives are enriched by the bond.

The mentoring relationship is a fine and romantic one. Wordsworth, for example, had a talent for mentoring itself, and claimed many followers. The most successful among them were Coleridge and de Quincy. Both were drug addicts and both, it could be argued, would never have been anything more than that without the attentions of the poet who encouraged and advised them.

Little wonder, then, as we ponder a society that appears to have a flair for nurturing educational underachievement, and concomitantly fabulous overachievement in moral turpitude, that the idea of mentoring is now so widely promoted as an educational panacea.

There are all kinds of mentoring programmes springing up in Britain's schools – some involving volunteers, some older pupils adopting younger ones, some bringing a mentor-site to look after the morale of a whole school, and others assigning paid workers to dealwith particular, difficult, pupils. The education department is gung-ho about the whole concept and wants to find more and more mentors, aiming to have 4,000 paid mentors in schools by 2004. It is so keen that it seems able to find some money to fund the enterprise as well.

But beneath all the hype, and the individual stories of mentor and mentored beaming about their special relationship, there is a bitter core to this seemingly happy phenomenon of state-sponsored befriending. The children who get mentors are not self-starters, turning up at a writer's door – as Beckett did at Joyce's – to present themselves for secretarial duties in a shrewd move to foster their own ambitions.They are instead children who for some reason have the very basics missing from their lives, and for whom meaningful contact with "role models" has had to be engineered.

How sad it is that we have fashioned a society that is so incapable of nurturing its children that specifically designated strangers have to step in and do the job that was once encompassed in the ordinary reach of parents, extended families, friends, churches, to some extent education itself and, to a quite large extent, work.

While it is clear that the breakdown of the family is partly responsible for the lack of parental mentoring – fathers make good mentors, especially to boys, and it would be interesting to see what percentage of mentored children do not have appropriate contact with their fathers – other factors have played crushing roles as well.

The move towards harshly regimented academic goals has not only made teachers into managers, and pupils into exam doers. It has also stolen the time that might once have been spent showing the class, and the individuals within it, that there are other things in life than academic success and that other talents are worthy of praise and nurture too.

Likewise the demise of the apprentice system has not only created a skills shortage in this country that would be laughable if it weren't so pitiful. It has also swept away a whole tier of social organisation that provided a practical mentoring programme for young people moving into adulthood. Even when I was a girl, a good apprenticeship was something to aim for and be proud of achieving. Now apprenticeships are few and far between, and don't have much status. They are looked on as some sort of job creation scheme, and their initial pay is scorned by the young.

All these – family networks, school culture, and first introductions to working life – have for various complex reasons ceased to provide mentoring in the ordinary warp and weft of existence in as effective a manner as once they did. The enthusiastic adoption of mentoring schemes can be seen as much as an admission of failure as a promise of future success.

The flowering of mentoring schemes is at heart a sticking-plaster project which aims to reintroduce artificially those relationships which were until recently provided more structurally. Nevertheless, the new research that suggests that this grafting on of wise and warm human contact is not working, is sad news indeed.

Carol Fitzgibbon, professor of education at Durham University, paired 120 "under-aspiring" 15-year-olds and had half of them mentored.The mentored pupils scored an average of 0.6 GCSE grades lower than those who were not. Her research will now be repeated among 3,000 pupils at 30 schools, to see what happens to this pattern under a larger cohort.

One piece of research does not prove anything, but the results are all the more disquieting because they come shortly after the charity Chance UK reported that there were no measurable improvements in disadvantaged children's behaviour after a year of mentoring.

Even at this stage, it is worth pointing out that in the case of Chance UK's findings, the fact that there were no actual improvements in behaviour does not reflect the possibility that the children, unmentored, might by now be displaying far greater degeneration of their behaviour had the guidance and encouragement not been there.

As for the Durham University research, this may simply confirm the suspicions of many – most uncompromisingly expressed by David Blunkett in his assertion that "criminal tendencies" can be spotted in children as young as three – that we are waiting too long before intervening in the lives of children who need help. A short spell of mentoring for uninspired 15-year-olds could easily confirm to them that not trying very hard is a way of getting attention, especially among those who had tried harder at a younger age without turning family heads. Mentoring from the start of their secondary school careers, though, could provide better results.

But perhaps in the end, all this confirms simply that mentors have to be sought out or chosen. This does not mean that specifically introducing a mentor can never work. But it does mean that the will to engage must be strong within the mentored child. Mentoring will work for some pupils and not for others, and will work as an intervention at some stages in a childhood and not at others.

The department of education is keen not to be deflected in its openness to mentoring, and claims, refreshingly for such a leagues- and results-led department, that mentors can help schools in way that were hard to measure, such as by reducing disruptive behaviour so that others can learn.

Overall though, these findings feed a creeping suspicion that the idea of mentoring is rather too simple a tool to tackle some of the very complex problems faced by children today. I want very much to believe that mentors can turn lives around. In fact, I know they can. But not under all circumstances, not by any means at all. The truth may be that for many damaged children such a gentle intervention will always be too little and will often be too late.

d.orr@independent.co.uk