Creating Belonging: The Power of Peer Mentoring
Oct 1, 2026 · Oppidan Education
At the inaugural Oppidan Lecture last week, Peter Hyman made the case for Human Maxxing: as machines grow more capable, children need to develop their human capacities to the fullest.
So much of what he said resonated closely with what we do at Oppidan, but one line stood out more than most. For so many young people, he said, a trusted adult outside the home makes all the difference: "someone who sees their potential, challenges them and stands by them, particularly at moments of transition: primary to secondary, school to college or university, finding a job and starting work."
We couldn't agree more and it's why we believe every child should have a mentor. But we'd adjust just one thing about what Peter says: sometimes the person who makes the difference doesn't have to be an adult. It might instead be a pupil a few years ahead, who walked the same corridors not so long ago and still remembers how everything felt.
Why an older pupil?
For a pupil new to secondary school, an older pupil offers something no adult can: they were in the same seat not long ago. Their advice is recent, specific to this school and free of the weight of authority. A Year 7 will ask a sixth former things they'd never ask a teacher: where to sit at lunch, what to do after falling out with a friend, and which teachers you really can’t be late for. And they take the advice seriously because it comes from someone they can picture themselves becoming.
Crucially, however, the benefit runs just as strongly the other way. For many older pupils, it's the first time someone has looked up to them for guidance, and that changes how they carry themselves. Helping a younger pupil settle in makes them see how far they've come. Being relied on, week after week, builds a real confidence. Sharing the mistakes they made at that age teaches them to own those mistakes, rather than hide them.
How it works
Our Peer Mentor Training runs in four stages. It begins with an assembly launching the programme, after which Year 12 pupils apply and the school chooses its mentors with our help.
Our mentors then visit to run three interactive workshops with small groups of eight to ten: Introduction to Mentoring, What Makes a Good Mentor? and Hit the Ground Running. After that, the peer mentors get going. They meet their mentees at break, lunch or after school, usually for eight to twelve sessions, with our Mentoring Toolkit to guide them.
To finish, every older pupil has a 25-minute one-to-one reflection with an Oppidan mentor – the highlights, the hard bits and the skills they've built – followed by a personalised report.
Two transitions at once
What is so powerful about Peer Mentoring is that it's mutually beneficial. Peer mentoring helps young people through two of those all-important transitions Hyman named, simultaneously. Younger pupils are finding their feet after the move from primary to secondary, while older pupils are about to leave school for college, university or work. Both need confidence and the ability to talk to people they don't yet know, outside of their usual peer groups.
Hyman talks about young people learning through relationships and through what they can offer others. For an older pupil, mentoring is exactly that. They learn to listen properly, to ask a good question and wait for the answer, and to turn up when someone is counting on them.
Multiply these instances of individual growth across a school and a whole new effect emerges: year groups that would otherwise pass each other in the corridor start to know each other; older pupils feel as though they play a part in the school they're in, and younger ones feel they belong in the one they've just joined.
Hyman puts belonging at the heart of Human Maxxing, and Ofsted is starting to take it seriously too. Its renewed inspection framework, in use since November 2025, made inclusion a new area of inspection, and the research behind it ties a pupil's sense of belonging closely to their wellbeing. Yet belonging can't be taught from the front of a classroom. It has to be built in a slower, more human way.
We've seen Peer Mentoring work at scale with E-ACT, where we have worked with 377 pupils across four of the trust's schools. 85% said they understand themselves and their identity better, 75% that their communication skills had improved and 80% that they feel more prepared for future challenges. Their teachers rated the programme's impact 8.5 out of 10. As Helen Evans put it: "The students showed great confidence, they were made to feel important."
Confidence, communication and a clearer sense of who you are: these are all key human skills that no exam can capture and no machine can do for you. Being human, in the end, comes down to the way we treat each other and interact with other people. Peer mentoring gives pupils on both sides the chance to develop just that.