REUK Mentee Perspectives: Empowering Young Voices

Refugee Education UK (REUK) is working towards a world where all refugee and asylum-seeking children and young people can access education, thrive in education, and use that education to create a hopeful, brighter future.

For young refugees arriving in the UK, education is a priority; it’s how lives begin to be rebuilt, and hope for the future is rekindled. But getting back into and progressing in education is fraught with challenge.

We believe that when we invest in education, it sends a clear and powerful message of hope: that there is a future, and it’s a future worth investing in and preparing for.

The REUK Educational Mentoring Programme, which the Foundation’s grant is supporting, seeks to provide a programme of bespoke weekly educational mentoring (a unique blend of 1:1 ESOL tutoring with integrated wellbeing support) for 16–25-year-old asylum seekers and refugees in London, Birmingham, Oxford, Peterborough and Cambridge.

With support from the Foundation, we are developing and integrating new ESOL components (including specific ESOL objectives, new monitoring and evaluation processes and training for volunteer mentors) into the existing mentoring programme. Through this, we want to improve ESOL outcomes for young refugees.