Growing Our Mentoring Team, Supporting More Children.

Thanks to generous funding from Wiltshire & Swindon Community Foundation and Tesco Stronger Starts we are able to grow our primary school mentoring programme - recruiting and training more volunteer mentors, strengthening the support we give them, and enabling more children to have a trusted adult who has time to listen.

Our ambition is to build a sustainable mentoring team that can support hundreds more children across Salisbury and Wiltshire in the years ahead.

Our mentors use My Happy Place, a six-to-eight-week wellbeing programme created specifically for children in Years 5 and 6.

A mentor usually meets individually with a child for around 30–45 minutes each week. Together, they work through age-appropriate activities and conversations that help children to:

• recognise and talk about their feelings

• understand worries and anxious thoughts

• identify trusted people and sources of support

• discover calming and coping strategies

• recognise their strengths

• build confidence and resilience

• approach change and challenges more positively

Meet Anne Roberts, our Mentoring Co-ordinator

“I’m so excited about the academic year ahead and the growth of our mentoring team.

When I joined The Bridge Project at Easter 2026, we had one mentor supporting children in one primary school. By the end of the summer term, we had four mentors working across four primary schools and had begun mentoring seven children.

This term, we hope to provide mentoring support to a further five children. I’m also about to begin training two new mentors, with more potential volunteers in the pipeline.

It’s an exciting time for The Bridge Mentoring Team, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it continues to grow.”

We are always looking for Volunteer Mentors, so if you are interested, click below to register.

Anne Roberts, Bridge Project Mentoring Co-ordinator with Volunteers