Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows a group of people pairing selected school students with adults from the banking system who they think will be appropriate mentors. The students introduce themselves on camera, as do the bankers. The bankers talk about their work or, in the case of one man, his concerns about being a mentor and the students talk about their backgrounds and what they hope for from the project.

Educational value points

• The six students and bankers speaking to the camera were about to take part in a mentoring project organised in 1998 by the Westpac Bank and Cleveland Street High School in Sydney. The project, the first of its type in Australia, was designed to assist students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds to broaden their experience and improve their work prospects by connecting each of them with a mentor from the banking system.

• In formal mentoring programs, such as the one being planned in the clip, professional people are matched with students or less experienced people to foster growth and help the latter to achieve their goals. These programs provide an effective strategy for providing people who do not have access to organisations and business through family or social groups with helpful and influential connections and introductions through informal networks.

• The planning group in this clip is shown discussing in some depth the qualities of the mentors and the students who will be involved in the program. As the one-to-one relationship is the key to effective mentoring, appropriate pairing tries to assess and match the skills, background and personality characteristics of the mentor with those of the person to be mentored. Such matching is a prerequisite for the development of a sound mentoring relationship.

• The viewer is given an insight into a range of attitudes and feelings revealed by the prospective partners as they discuss their involvement in the mentoring project. The individual interviews show both the mentors and the students expressing their feelings of confidence, or the lack of it, and their hopes, fears, ambitions and concerns.

• Westpac has reported that the mentoring project being planned in the clip achieved significant social returns for the students, including increased self-motivation and a more positive outlook on life.

• Mentoring programs such as the one shown in the clip have been shown to benefit the mentors as well as the mentored. Mentors have the opportunity to develop leadership qualities by being personally involved in the development of another person, by reflecting on their own professional skills and practices and by having their world views broadened through the interactions with younger people.

• In this clip the footage is edited to cut directly between the individual students and mentors as they speak to the camera, revealing some of the qualities they may bring to the mentoring partnership. These vignettes allow the viewer to make an assessment about the potential success of the student–mentor pairings.

• The interviews with the students and mentors reveal that the prospective partners are likely to come from different backgrounds and life experiences. Approximately 55 per cent of Cleveland Street’s students have an Indigenous background, and the school caters for recently arrived refugees and children from diverse cultural backgrounds.
• The mentors and the school students undertook training programs designed to assist them understand each other’s culture and values. Volunteering New South Wales and the NSW Department of Education provided training to the mentors, including issues of child protection, Aboriginal culture and communicating with young people. The students’ training included communication skills and what to expect from a mentoring relationship.

• The film Two Tribes made by the ABC showed the positive changes in the students brought about by the project. The documentary, seen by people all over Australia, generated great interest and requests for information concerning the model and its evaluation. Similar projects, based on the Westpac–Cleveland Street High School model, were conducted in Melbourne and Launceston.