From One Small Group to a Whole-School Culture: The Story of the Male Mentoring Programme

As a trauma informed PE teacher, and Deputy Designated Safeguarding Lead, I was increasingly aware of the pressures many boys were navigating. Some struggled with confidence. Others found relationships difficult. Some appeared angry, withdrawn or disconnected. Others were carrying experiences and emotions where a safe environment to explore was welcomed.

At the time, there was no grand programme, no curriculum, no fully developed model. Just a need, and a willingness to try something different. That question became the Male Mentoring Programme (MMP), and it has grown into a student-led mentoring structure that, in the last academic year alone, has reached over 60 students across every year group, almost a quarter of the school.

St David’s prides itself on helping to shape young people who step confidently into a world of rapid change, from technology and sustainability to medicine and business. And most importantly, young people who navigate uncertainty with clarity and calm. So, this programme played an important part in our ethos.

Perhaps the most significant part of that growth is that it happened without adding staff for every new group. The programme has grown because the students who experience it are increasingly becoming the people who sustain it. That has become one of the most important lessons from the work.

Starting with belonging

MMP was never meant to be another intervention for boys who were struggling. It was meant to be a space where boys could experience belonging.

We built it around a simple, trauma-informed idea: behaviour is often communication. What looks on the surface like defiance, arrogance, withdrawal or aggression is often saying something much more complicated underneath.

So, the sessions began with relationships, not content. Small groups. Check-ins. Real scenarios. Practice at listening and empathy. Slowly, boys became more comfortable talking about emotions and relationships, at their own pace.

We learned early on that vulnerability can't be demanded. It must become safe. Our role as facilitators was to model the relationship we wanted the boys to build with each other: curiosity instead of judgement, empathy before advice, challenge without humiliation, and the belief that a young person can be held accountable without being shamed.

Over time, something shifted. Staff began noticing more participation, more openness in reflective conversations, and more positive interactions between students, both inside and outside mentoring sessions.

The conversations started to change

One of the clearest patterns has been in what students are willing to talk about.

At first, most of it was about other people. Teachers. Rules. Sanctions. School systems. What felt unfair. Boys were very comfortable pointing out what everyone else was doing wrong.

As trust grew, the conversation turned inward. Their own emotions. Their friendships. Their reactions. Their boundaries. The things they found genuinely difficult.

And then something else began to emerge: the boys started noticing each other. They asked questions instead of judging. They challenged one another. They celebrated courage and vulnerability. They began to understand that their own behaviour could affect someone else.

That shift, from blaming others, to understanding themselves, to caring about each other, is one of the clearest signs of how far the programme has come. It's also the point where real mentoring becomes possible.

When challenge starts to feel like care

One of the biggest changes we've seen is in how students challenge each other.

In one session, a younger student calmly told an older pupil he didn't like how he'd been spoken to. No shouting. No threats. No attempt to overpower him. Just a clear boundary.

That moment mattered. We spend a lot of time in MMP exploring the difference between anger and aggression. Anger isn't inherently bad. It can tell us a boundary has been crossed, or that something needs to change. What matters is what we do with it.

Through the programme, students practise expressing strong feelings without using them to dominate or control someone else. That's changed how they receive challenge too. When there's a foundation of belonging and empathy, being challenged doesn't have to feel like rejection. It can feel like care.

A student saying "I don't think that was okay" can really mean: "I expect more from you, because I know you're capable of more." That's a very different model of male peer culture, one built on accountability and connection rather than status and dominance.

Vulnerability changes the room

Some of the most powerful moments in MMP happen when a student takes the risk of sharing something they've kept hidden.

One older student, who had always found vulnerability difficult, spoke at length about hard experiences in his family and the impact they'd had on him. What mattered most wasn't what he shared. It was what happened next.

The other boys listened. They didn't rush to fix it. They didn't joke. They didn't use it against him. They responded with empathy, and admiration. One told him how proud he was that he'd been brave enough to share. Another said he now saw him completely differently.

He looked uncomfortable and exposed at first. But as the group responded, he grew more confident, describing how fear had shaped him and how he was starting to feel less alone with it.

That's something you can't teach from a lesson plan. When one young person takes the risk of being vulnerable and is met with compassion, it gives everyone else permission to do the same. The culture starts to change from within.

What we're seeing

Across the first eighteen months and multiple year groups, the same patterns kept showing up:

• More confidence speaking in groups
• Greater willingness to talk about emotions and relationships
• Stronger peer support and encouragement
• More constructive responses to conflict
• More respectful challenge between students
• Real growth in student leadership
• Strong engagement from older students as peer mentors
• Greater empathy for other people's experiences
• More confidence setting and holding healthy boundaries

From supported students to student leaders

This is where MMP started to become something bigger than mentoring.

The older students who'd been through the programme were increasingly able to create the same conditions for younger pupils. They understood the language, the principles, and, most importantly, what it actually felt like to be on the receiving end.

So, they began stepping into mentoring roles themselves, supervised by staff. A student who had once received belonging could now create it for someone else. The programme became increasingly self-sustaining.

Over eighteen months, one small mentoring group became a structure supporting more than 60 students, with mentoring connections in every year group, built through student leadership rather than simply adding more staff-led sessions.

That matters, practically and philosophically. Schools can't solve every wellbeing challenge by continually adding another adult-led intervention. A sustainable approach has to build capacity within the community itself. Staff remain essential for safeguarding, supervision and professional oversight, that's non-negotiable, but students aren't being asked to become counsellors. They're being taught how to be better peers, better listeners and better leaders. Adults create the framework. Students increasingly create the culture.

Rethinking behaviour

MMP has also changed how students understand behaviour itself. Instead of seeing it as something to simply control, students are encouraged to get curious about what's happening underneath it.

That doesn't mean fewer boundaries. If anything, the opposite has happened. Students have become more comfortable with the idea that healthy relationships need boundaries.

One student had stepped away from a relationship because the group felt he was losing parts of himself in it. When he later returned to it, the group didn't respond with disappointment or "we told you so." They got curious instead. He explained the relationship felt different now, that he could stand his ground and say clearly what he would and wouldn't accept.

The group recognised that as real progress, and told him so. He later thanked them, saying he didn't think he'd have got there without them.

Movement, regulation and connection

Mentoring doesn't always start the moment students sit down. With younger groups especially, we've seen students arrive full of energy, needing to move before they're ready to reflect.

Rather than treating that energy as a problem, we've learned to work with it. A session might start with movement or physical activity before the group comes together. Once students feel calmer and more grounded, the quality of conversation changes completely.

It's taught us to design sessions around the whole young person, not just the version of them that arrives already calm and ready to talk. Movement and play create the conditions for mentoring. Mentoring, in turn, gives students the space to build relational and emotional skills.

Safeguarding comes first

MMP doesn't replace our pastoral or safeguarding systems. It sits alongside them.

Students understand clear boundaries around confidentiality, and know that some information can't stay within the group if there's a safeguarding concern. Staff remain responsible for supervision, responding to disclosures, and liaising with our safeguarding team.

That structure lets students take genuine ownership of the programme, without carrying inappropriate responsibility. They can support each other without being responsible for fixing each other. That balance is what allows MMP to stay relational while keeping the right professional boundaries firmly in place.

The real measure of success

It would be easy to sum up MMP in numbers: more than 60 students, out of a school of around 260. Every year group reached. Eighteen months of growth, without adding staff for every new group.

Those figures matter. But they don't tell the whole story.

The real evidence lives in the moments in between: a boy who once responded to conflict with physical dominance choosing to walk away instead. A younger student calmly setting a boundary with someone older. A boy finding the courage to challenge a sanction respectfully, and being heard. A group meeting vulnerability with compassion instead of ridicule. Boys who once talked mainly about what was wrong with everyone else, learning to reflect on themselves. Older students becoming mentors for the next year group coming through.

Small moments. Together, they add up to a real cultural shift.

From programme to culture

Perhaps the biggest lesson from MMP is this: the goal was never to build a successful mentoring programme. It was to build a culture where its principles become normal.

A culture where boys can say they're struggling. Where a firm "no" doesn't need aggression behind it. Where vulnerability doesn't cost you status. Where challenge is a form of care. Where students notice when someone else is finding things hard. Where older pupils see leadership as responsibility, not status. Where belonging isn't something only adults provide, but something students create for each other.

That's the direction MMP is heading. What began eighteen months ago as one small mentoring group has become a whole-school model, reaching more than 60 students across every year group, with the potential to keep growing because the young people who experience it become the next generation of mentors.

For me, that's the most exciting part of this work. The programme isn't becoming self-sustaining because we need fewer adults. It's becoming self-sustaining because we're raising more young people who understand what it means to build a safe, connected and compassionate community.

That, ultimately, is what MMP is trying to do. Not to fix boys. Not to manage behaviour. Not to give young people another programme to attend. But to give them the experience of belonging, the skills to build real relationships, and the chance to become the people who create that for others too.

By Ross Williams 
Deputy Head of Sixth Form, PE Teacher and Designated Deputy Safeguarding Lead, St David's College