This report is the outcome of a piece of research on youth mentoring commissioned by Nesta and undertaken by a team at the Policy Evaluation and Research Unit at Manchester Metropolitan University and the Alliance for Useful Evidence.

The purpose of this research is threefold: first, to identify whether youth mentoring schemes are effective (whether they work); second, to identify the factors that make them effective (how they work); and third, to provide a number of practical recommendations so that research evidence can be used to improve the commissioning, design and delivery of youth mentoring programmes.