Review: The KidsKope Peer Mentoring Programme

Nina Wroe and Penny McFarlane

Jessica Kingsley Publishers

ISBN: 978-1849055000

£19.99

192 pages

At a time when children and young people are feeling increasingly stressed, this book provides a comprehensive set of resources to explore and implement the KidsKope Peer Mentoring Programme. The KidsKope approach trains young people aged 14 to 18 as mentors to facilitate mentoring sessions with nine- to 13-year-olds to understand, explore and cope with conflict they experience, including bullying, parental separation, conflict with parents, being a young carer, and change and transition, among others.

Using a range of creative approaches, such as drama and relaxation activities, the KidsKope resource provides a structured approach that encourages conflict to be explored in a safe way to enable children and young people to develop their understanding of conflict, the emotional effects of conflict and how they can cope with conflict they experience. The book provides resources to support each stage of implementing the approach: recruiting peer mentors; peer mentor training sessions; and a number of mentoring workshop outlines, activities and materials.

One of the main strengths of the training sessions is how they provide an accessible exploration of conflict and how this may be communicated through young people's behaviour.

Thus, in addition to practical approaches to facilitating peer mentoring, the training sessions provide resources to encourage mentors to understand what the specific behaviours of children and young people may be communicating. This is something many young people will understand and empathise with and gives a good grounding for their work as mentors as well as in their own lives.

The importance of children and young people's voices is present throughout the approach to ensure the sessions explore issues identified by the mentees, as they know best about the conflicts they experience. This may seem obvious, but it is something that is often overlooked when considering issues such as conflict, when behaviour is often regarded as something that needs to be managed or controlled, rather than explored in discussion led by children and young people.

The use of role-play is at the heart of the approach and includes activities to help children develop their characters; explore relationships between characters; explore the feelings and emotions of their characters through answering from role; methods for exploring situations and alternative actions through reframing; and derolling to help children come out of character.

In my work, children and young people frequently cite that their expressions of distress are often misread as them being difficult or disruptive: that it is their behaviours and actions that are responded to, not the underlying cause. Any attempts to enable children to understand that our behaviour is a form of communication and explore the conflict they experience must be welcomed.

Reviewed by Kate Martin, independent consultant and director, Common Room Consulting

The KidsKope Peer Mentoring Programme: download sample pages here