Specialist Mentor

Faculty/Department
- Student Services
- Contract Type
- Permanent
- Full-time / Part-time
- Part-Time
- Weekly Hours
- 0hrs
- Employment Visa
- Non-sponsorable
- Posted Date
- 29/08/2025
- Closing Date
- 10/09/2025
- Ref No
- 5860

The Role
What you’ll do
Who you are - Qualifications, Experience, Knowledge and Skills required
How to apply

**Benefits**:
Employment Visa

The Role

Working as a member of a multi-disciplinary team you will meet regularly, by appointment, with your allocated students to advise and assist them on appropriate approaches and strategies which they may adopt to facilitate effective study and learning.

Appointments are normally made within 4 - 8 weeks of the closing date.

What you’ll do

Specialist mentors provide highly specialist, specifically tailored, one to one support which helps students in accessing their higher education studies. Barriers to learning. This could include a range of issues, for example, coping with anxiety and stress situations, how to deal with concentration difficulties, time management, prioritising workload and creating a suitable work-life balance.

The SM-ASC role can be recommended for students with autism spectrum conditions (ASC), attention deficit disorder (ADD) or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)

Specialist Mentors should not act as advocates or counsellors. Their role is to help students recognise the barriers to learning created by their impairment and support them in developing strategies to address these barriers, including at times of transition, e.g. when starting at university or when planning to move on from it. For some students this support will need to be ongoing while for others it might be gradually phased out or only be required at certain points of their course.

Individual students will normally have an allocated time period and number of sessions per week allotted to mentoring. Mentors are required to work within the guidelines provided to them in line with the student’s allocation.

Minimum work hours are not guaranteed and will vary according to individual assignments; these respond to individual student support plans and work around individual timetable scheduling. On average, an eligible student may be allocated between 1-2 hours mentoring per week during term time. Students will be allocated to you by your line manager taking into consideration, availability and established competences.

This employment opportunity is offered as a Non-Medical Helper funded by Disabled Students’ Allowances. Whilst the majority of mentoring sessions will take place during the academic terms mentors should be available throughout the year. It will be highly desirable for mentors to be available for 1:1 sessions between 9.00am and 5.00pm.

**Main Duties & Responsibilities**
- Orientation: Ensure students are able successfully navigate the campus for scheduled sessions (fresher’s week sessions; lectures, seminars and workshops; appointments at finance office etc).
- Transition: Use knowledge of the University’s structures and procedures to guide and support students transitioning through University from their arrival, breaks in study, through to transition out of University life in preparation for employment.
- In collaboration with the student, support in the maintenance of their timetable and appointments; also monitoring student participation in the weekly schedule.
- In collaboration with the student, plot assignment deadlines (identifying any converging deadlines) to support the student in managing their study action plan. You will plan for the regular (usually weekly) monitoring and review of progress for all goals and tasks.
- Providing the information and support required for students to develop their own skills in planning, identification of priorities, goal setting, and time management; similarly for their recording, storage and organisation of key information for ease of retrieval as it is needed (e.g. use of assistive technology and hard copy files of lecture notes etc).
- Anticipating any access needs that may arise for the individual because of unexpected developments (late changes to rooms or session changes), receiving and acting on communications relating to these to ensure their progression and minimise negative impacts on the student.
- Assessing the needs of the student in order to refer the student to relevant specialist support staff, departmental and University administrative.
- Monitoring the student’s engagement with their course of study and identifying any shortfall in relation to the student’s current support provision recommendations.
- Build a working relationship with the student to quickly identify any difficulties that may arise in order to signpost to suitable support to prevent disengagement from their course of study and to empower the student to make decisions relating to their progression.
- Liaising with departmental colleagues (i.e. Accessibility Advisers, Wellbeing Adviser and Study Skills T