Supporting access to mentors

Mentoring can be a very useful way for many refugees to learn about working life in the UK. Mentors support, encourage, motivate and guide their mentees as they seek to achieve their goals in education, employment and integration.

Many mentoring schemes have been developed at the local level. Mentors may be from established refugee communities, or UK citizens already working in a particular employment sector.

A national mentoring campaign, Time Together, matches UK citizens in one-to-one mentoring relationships with refugees. Education Action runs a mentoring scheme just for refugees. The mentors are managers, business people and other professionals who work with individual refugees or groups of clients with similar job interests.

The ROSE website provides information and links to several organisations which have mentoring programmes.

The Refugee Integration and Employment Service (RIES) is available to anyone over the age of 18 who has been granted refugee status or humanitarian protection. It provides a standard level of service to new refugees across the United Kingdom, wherever they are living when their status is granted.

The RIES offers a 12-month service This service has three complementary elements:

• an advice and support service;
• an employment advice service;
• a mentoring service

The DH Race Equality Action Plan requires all senior leaders in the DH and NHS to show their commitment by offering personal mentorship to a member of staff from an ethnic minority.

The King’s Fund has published a range of publications to support refugee doctors and other health professionals including:

• Refugee doctors : support, development and integration in the NHS
• Reaping the rewards : retraining refugee healthcare professionals for the NHS