ABSTRACT
Most of the young people recruited on to the Mentoring Plus programme had recently left school or were in the final few years of their compulsory education and faced important decisions about their future. The programme was designed to ease the transition into early adulthood and one of its key aims was to help at-risk young people (back) into education, training and employment. This focus, and indeed this language, reflects the now well established empirical evidence which suggests that there are a number of readily identifiable ‘risk factors’ in childhood and adolescence that heighten the likelihood of problems later in life. These include parental conflict and separation, early involvement in offending, drinking and drug use, and disruptive behaviour at school.
