A note from Colin Adam, Head of Systems, Evidence and Impact, MCR Pathways

We’re publishing this following Care Experienced History Month, and the timing matters. What follows is evidence — statistical models, long tables of effect sizes, years of analysis — but it’s evidence about the lives of young people who have too often been asked to trust that things will get better, without anyone being able to show them how.

When I joined MCR Pathways in 2019, I inherited a question that had been sitting with the organisation for years: how do we prove what mentors and young people already know?

Anyone who has mentored or been mentored can feel the shift — the slow building of trust, the moment a young person decides school might be worth showing up for after all. But feeling something and evidencing it are very different things, and Care Experienced young people deserve more than anecdotes.

In 2020, working with ScotCen and the Robertson Trust, we published our first independent evaluation. It showed MCR Pathways mentoring worked for Care Experienced young people, often facing the most challenging circumstances, and that it kept working as we expanded from one secondary school in Glasgow to all 30. That evidence underpinned our national expansion — which happened to coincide with a pandemic that deprived young people of time in school, and of time with teachers, friends and mentors. Whether mentoring could hold its shape under those conditions was an open question.

In 2021, we began working with Ipsos Scotland to find out. The analysis covers 2016 to 2023 and draws on five separate statistical models to answer three questions. Does MCR Pathways work nationally, or only in Glasgow? Has the impact held through the pandemic? And does the programme represent good use of public investment?

The short version: the impact is real, it travels across our national footprint, and it held through the years covered by the analysis. The rest is what you’re about to read.

The findings are striking. Among the Care Experienced pupils mentored through MCR Pathways during the evaluation period, 172 fewer were unemployed nine months after leaving school. 103 more entered university. Between 245 and 400 fewer were ever excluded. Each of those is a young person whose trajectory changed.

The analysis also confirms what we hoped: that the programme represents good value for public investment, at a level that stands up to Treasury-grade scrutiny. That matters for our partners and funders, and you’ll find the full detail in the pages that follow.

But what I keep returning to isn’t the economics. It’s what the numbers mean. A young person who would have left school with nowhere to go, going somewhere. A young person who was heading for exclusion, staying. A young person who didn’t think university was for them, sitting in a lecture hall. Multiply that by the hundreds and you start to see what a mentor — showing up once a week, for as long as it takes — can do.

This is the evidence base our young people, our mentors, and our partners deserve. Following a month that asks the rest of us to listen harder and act more clearly, I’m proud to share it.