One hour a week: what volunteer STEM mentoring actually involves

“One hour a week” is how volunteer mentoring is usually advertised, and it is both true and slightly misleading. It is true of the teaching. It is not true of the first month.

We have run an online mentoring scheme since 2021, pairing young refugees and forced migrants with volunteer mentors — mostly undergraduates, postgraduates, PhD students and postdoctoral researchers from UCL — for weekly sessions in STEM subjects, IT and English. Since 2022 we have supported 32 students through more than 250 hours of mentoring.

This article is the description we wish we had been given before we started: what the commitment really is, how the matching works, what a session actually looks like, what fails, and what mentors say afterwards.

The honest time commitment

Here is the shape of it, from mentors who have done a full cycle.

Hours per week, as reported by mentors

Including preparation, not just contact time

Show the data as a table

Hours per week, as reported by mentors

Category	Value
Weeks 1–3	5 hrs
Weeks 4–8	3.5 hrs
Weeks 9–16	2.5 hrs
Weeks 17–24	2 hrs

One of our mentors put a number on it directly:

I would advise potential volunteers to consider the time commitment to be approximately 4–6 hours per week for the first few weeks, but that can reduce to 2–3 hours later on, once a routine has been established. Elias, PhD researcher at UCL

And another, on the ratio of teaching to preparation:

I only taught one hour per week, but spent much more time preparing. My advice is to stay committed and give your best — because these students deserve it. Chapman, PhD student at UCL

Who mentors

There is no required background beyond expertise in the subject and the willingness to show up.

Several of our mentors had never taught before. That turns out to matter far less than expected:

This was my first mentoring experience. It improved my time management, and I learned the importance of patience and adaptability in teaching. Chapman, mentor

How pairs are matched

Matching is done by hand by the coordinating team, on three things: subject, level and goal.

Subject. A STEM mentor is matched to a STEM student. This sounds obvious and is regularly got wrong by larger schemes that match on availability. One of our mentors singled it out:

The team appears to be good at matching students to mentors considering both their backgrounds. For example I have a background in STEM and was matched to a STEM student, therefore I was able to use my existing knowledge to the maximum. Elias, mentor

Level. A first-year undergraduate is often a better match for a GCSE student than a postdoc is, because the syllabus is fresher and the gap in confidence is smaller.

Goal. A student aiming at medicine needs different preparation from one aiming at an engineering apprenticeship. We ask, and we match on the answer.

Moderators sit above the pairs — a layer of volunteers who check in, spot problems, and step in when a match is not working. In a scheme this size that layer is what stops a struggling pair from quietly stopping.

What actually happens in a session

Not a lesson, usually. The mentors who describe their approach most confidently describe something closer to a weekly clinic.

The first two or three sessions

Exploratory. Nobody teaches much. The mentor is working out what the student actually needs, which is rarely what the referral form said.

My approach to mentoring centred on regularly asking the student for ideas on what they would like me to cover in our sessions. The first 2–3 sessions were more exploratory, aiming to understand the broad areas where I could be of help. Elias, mentor

The middle stretch

Homework and coursework, mostly. Working through what school or college set, at the pace the student needs rather than the pace the class ran at. This is where the mentor’s real advantage shows: a class of thirty cannot stop; a pair of two can stop for as long as it takes.

Mentors describe two things they do constantly. The first is creating a safe space to not understand:

I wanted to create a safe space where the student could feel comfortable voicing their struggles with certain topics that they are covering in school, and so present our sessions as an opportunity to spend more time on these topics. Christina, PhD student in Electronic & Electrical Engineering, UCL

The second is language. Almost every mentor ends up teaching some English, whatever their subject:

Some of the main challenges my students faced included language barriers, limited access to resources, and difficulty balancing academic demands with personal obligations. To help them overcome these challenges, I used various strategies, such as providing additional explanations, examples, and highlighting the key terms in verbose questions to overcome the language barrier. Alyssa, PhD researcher at the London Centre for Nanotechnology

The final stretch

Applications and exams. Revision calendars, past papers, personal statements, mock interviews. This is the part with the clearest payoff and the tightest deadlines.

One student described what that looked like from the other side:

My mentor helped me prepare a revision calendar for my upcoming exams, which was one of the key components of my motivation as my exams were months away. We also had sessions where we just talked about life, how to study, how to manage work-life balance, which was very meaningful. Right now, as there is little time left until my exams, she is helping me stay on track and is preparing me extra tests and marking them to help me see my weakest parts. A Bridging the Future student

Note the middle sentence. We also had sessions where we just talked about life. That is not the mentor going off-task. For a young person with no adult in the country whose job is to think about their future, it may be the most valuable hour of the week.

What the scheme covers

The mock interview provision is worth flagging, because it is otherwise something families buy. A scheme staffed by people who have sat on the other side of a UCL admissions conversation can offer it for nothing, and does.

The five steps of setting up a mentoring programme

How we run each annual cycle — offered for anyone building something similar

• 1. Choose a high-level goal5

  What the student most needs to move forward

• 2. Choose a format5

  1-to-1, small group, peer or subject-specific

• 3. Recruit volunteers and assign roles5

  Mentors, moderators, coordinators

• 4. Match mentors and mentees5

  On subject need, level and goals

• 5. Evaluate5

  Collect feedback and report on outcomes

Show the data as a table

The five steps of setting up a mentoring programme

Category	Value
1. Choose a high-level goal	5
2. Choose a format	5
3. Recruit volunteers and assign roles	5
4. Match mentors and mentees	5
5. Evaluate	5

What goes wrong

We would rather publish this than pretend it is frictionless.

Momentum collapses. The single most common failure. A session is missed, then two, then the pair stops. Every experienced mentor’s advice converges on the same fix:

Try and find a regular slot, that stays fixed, to get together with your mentee. Establishing a routine will be useful for both parties, and ensures the momentum keeps going. It’s easy for work and personal life to get in the way, but this programme is important and really does change lives. So allocating it a dedicated time for your headspace is really useful. Fern, PhD student in High Energy Physics at UCL and CERN

Life intervenes, on the student’s side. Housing moves, asylum decisions, family news, work. A mentor who treats a missed session as a discipline problem loses the student. A mentor who treats it as information adapts:

I had a student that had a lot of personal circumstances to overcome during their time with me, and would often feel overwhelmed juggling everything with their studies. Together we came up with a plan for their studying… We made sure to never go too long without contact to keep the momentum high. Fern, mentor

The mentor over-plans. New mentors often arrive at session one with a syllabus. Almost all of them abandon it by session three:

With limited knowledge of where they are at in their academic curriculum, it can be challenging to plan lessons that cater to their specific needs. Instead, I developed skills to think on my feet, become more flexible and resourceful, and learnt to adjust my teaching approach accordingly. Alyssa, mentor

Timelines move. Exam dates change, college offers arrive early, an interview appears with a week’s notice. Adaptability is the core skill, more than subject knowledge.

What mentors get

Every mentor we have asked says some version of the same thing, and it is not altruism-flavoured. It is concrete professional development.

Communication under real constraints. Explaining a hard idea to someone who does not share your first language is the most demanding form of science communication there is.

This programme has forced me to really think about the best and alternative ways to communicate complicated and new concepts, which is invaluable for me as a PhD student, especially as I personally wanted to improve my communication skills for when I attend conferences and present my own work. It has also really emphasised the importance of understanding something in order to then teach it to someone else. Christina, mentor

Session design and teaching craft. Useful for anyone who will ever demonstrate, lecture or supervise.

My experience as a BtF mentor has helped me hone my teaching skills, including communication and session design. It has empowered me to leverage my network to support positive change. Hector, PhD student in electrochemical energy materials at UCL

Understanding of a system you probably do not know.

At the beginning of the mentoring scheme I was not very familiar with the secondary education system in the UK. The scheme helped me understand its structure and function, and to appreciate its strengths and weaknesses. Elias, mentor

Perspective.

It reminds me to be grateful. I have a fantastic family around me and was raised in a stable environment. It’s easy to take this, something I’ve had since I was born, for granted. When I form close working relationships with others who have overcome things I never used to even think about, it resonates with me. Fern, mentor

Does it work?

We are cautious here, for the same reason we are cautious everywhere: we are small, our alumni scatter, and we do not have the resources to run the kind of longitudinal follow-up that would produce a defensible outcome statistic.

What we can say is what mentors and students observed.

Several students have managed to receive offers to study at university. Bridging the Future provided something tailored to their unique circumstances. Chapman, mentor

I believe that above all the Bridging the Future programme has helped my student identify possible career paths for their future. It helped the student understand what their academic strengths are, and what they enjoy studying the most. Elias, mentor

And from a student who came in with no interest in science whatsoever:

Online tutoring was helpful and helped me to improve my grades in science. My mentor supported and helped me with science revision, my college application, even my college interview — what questions might come and how I should answer them. With this help, I got a chance to get an offer for my college application. Enkophazion, student

Thirty-two students is a small number. For each of those thirty-two, it was the whole thing.

The shortest advice we have received

We asked mentors what they would say to someone considering it. Most gave a paragraph. Hector gave two words:

Do it. Hector, mentor

A mentoring year, month by month

The scheme is easier to picture as a calendar than as a description. This is the shape of a typical pairing.

Two things about that calendar are worth flagging to a prospective mentor.

December is where pairs die. Term ends, everyone is busy, one session is missed and then the thread is gone. The fix is trivially simple and almost never done: agree the January date before December starts.

March is not the end for the student. The scheme closes in March; their exams do not. The most useful last session is not more teaching but a plan — a written revision calendar the student can follow without you. Mentors who do this report that it is the thing students refer back to most.

How to run a first session

New mentors ask for this constantly, so here is what our experienced ones do.

Do not teach. The temptation is to arrive with material and prove you are useful. Resist it. The first session is for finding out what year they are in, what they are studying, what is coming up, what they find hard, and what they want to do afterwards.

Ask what they want to cover. Then ask again next week, and the week after. The single most repeated piece of advice from our mentors is that the student, not the mentor, should shape the agenda.

Establish the slot. Same day, same time, every week. Write it down. This one decision predicts whether the pairing survives better than anything else.

Find out about the exam board. GCSE and A-level content varies by board, and a student who is being taught to one specification does not benefit from practice questions written for another. It takes two minutes to ask and saves a term of mismatch.

Say what you do not know. A mentor who says “I don’t know, let me check” models exactly the behaviour a student needs and removes the pressure to perform.

Ask about their week. Not as small talk — as information. A student who has just been moved to different accommodation is not going to absorb electromagnetism this Thursday, and knowing that lets you change the plan instead of concluding that they are not trying.

What we ask of mentors, in full

We would rather set this out plainly than have a volunteer discover it in week three.

We also ask for two things that are harder to put in a table. The first is honesty with the moderator when a pairing is not working — we would much rather rematch in week four than lose a student in week ten. The second is finishing the cycle. A mentor who stops in January leaves a young person who has, quite reasonably, concluded that adults do not stay.

What mentors do not have to be

A teacher. Most of ours are not. Several had never taught anything before.

An expert in the exam. Knowing the subject is enough; the specification can be looked up together, and doing so in front of the student is a useful demonstration of how to find things out.

An immigration adviser. You should not be, and you are not expected to be. Questions about status, housing or casework go to the moderator, who routes them to organisations equipped to answer them.

Available at fixed office hours. The slot is agreed between the pair. Evenings and weekends are common.

A counsellor. Being a consistent, interested adult is the pastoral contribution. Anything beyond that goes through the moderator.

Common questions

Can I mentor from outside London? Yes. The scheme is online. Our mentors are concentrated around UCL but the sessions are not geographically constrained.

Can I mentor if I am an undergraduate? Yes, and undergraduates are often the best match for GCSE-level students because the syllabus is recent and the confidence gap is smaller.

What if my student stops replying? Tell the moderator early. It is usually life rather than disinterest, and a moderator can often re-establish contact where an individual mentor cannot.

What subjects are most needed? Mathematics and physics, consistently. English is also in demand, and mentors who can support academic English alongside a science subject are especially useful.

Do I need a DBS check? Volunteers working with young people complete safeguarding onboarding before being matched, and we follow the standard expectations for a charity working with under-18s. The coordinating team will take you through what is required for the role you are taking.

How much does the charity spend on mentoring? Very little, which is precisely why it is our best-value programme. The scheme is delivered entirely by volunteers; the costs are coordination, safeguarding and the small administrative overhead of running it. We set the arithmetic out in Where the money goes.

Can I do the summer school instead? Yes — the summer school runs across two weeks in August at UCL and needs teachers, demonstrators and coordinators. Some volunteers do both; most do one.

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Compiled December 2025. Mentor and student quotations are published with consent and appear in full in our stories collection. Programme figures come from Bridging the Future records, 2022–2025.

Keep reading

• The GCSE vacuum — the gap mentoring is aimed at.
• From 1% to 15% — where the students are trying to get to.
• Inside a free STEM summer school — the fortnight that precedes the mentoring year.
• Volunteer with us — roles, time commitment and how to join.