Positive Peer Mentors

Our Positive Peer Mentors are a group of students who volunteer to support other students through their transition into secondary school and during Key Stage 3. They mentor these students on issues such as attendance, under achievement, bullying and friendships and enable them to address their individual problems in a mature and emotionally intelligent way.

Our Positive Peer Mentors are visible around the school and can work one-to-one with vulnerable students referred by concerned teaching staff and parents. They are an early intervention strategy in an integrated inclusion system to help address minor issues before they develop into crisis situations, leaving staff with the capacity to deal with the most challenging cases.

Our Positive Peer Mentors are:

• Friends
• Challengers
• Enablers
• Empowerers
• Supporters
• Mediators

Peer Mentoring at Ripley St Thomas Academy has a positive effect on wellbeing and impact for students across different cohorts. Positive benefits can include:

• Those receiving the help of a Peer Mentor showing improved self-esteem and resilience.
• Those training as Positive Peer Mentors developing a language of empathy and a confidence in their ability to help others.
• Those working as Positive Peer Mentors showing greater maturity and understanding and a pride in their role that improves their aspirations for the future.
• Students showing the effects of being surrounded by emotionally intelligent peers who diffuse aggression and provide role models for success.

The Positive Peer Mentors also impact the whole school by:

• Creating a team ethos where students work with staff to support others through difficult times.
• Raising the school profile within the school and local community.
• Creating positive and aspirational role models.

Peer Mentoring prepares learners to be personally and socially effective.  It improves both inter and intra personal intelligence and builds the capacity to empathise. In addition, it provides learning experiences in which all can develop and apply life skills, explore their personal attitudes and values and acquire a maturity to face the challenges of adult life.

Specifically, the aims of positive peer mentoring are to:

• Develop self-esteem and intra personal skills.
• Promote self-respect and respect for others.
• Equip mentors and mentees to make choices that promote safe and healthy lives.
• Empower students to participate in school and have confidence in their opinion.
• Raise aspirations by providing a non-traditional platform for success within a school environment.
• Create a supported environment to shed learning apathy, poor behaviour perceptions and recreate self-belief.