What the World Can Teach Us About Mentoring in Schools
A new comparative study in Inovasi Kurikulum, an Indonesian peer-reviewed open-access journal, offers one of the most comprehensive looks to date at how ten high-performing countries structure student mentoring in secondary schools. Risdiyanto and colleagues at Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia conducted a PRISMA-guided systematic review of empirical studies and policy documents published between 2015 and 2025 across Singapore, Japan, South Korea, China, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. Their goal was to identify design principles that make mentoring systems actually work, and to inform Indonesia’s newly formalized Homeroom Teacher policy.
The authors reviewed 25 documents and surfaced a few clear patterns.
National policy matters. Countries like Singapore, Finland, and Japan have built mentoring into the architecture of their education systems through programs such as the Form Teacher Guidance Period, student welfare legislation, and seikatsu shidō life guidance protocols.
Integrated roles outperform fragmented ones. When mentoring combines academic and pastoral support in a single role, results are consistently stronger than in systems that split those functions apart.
Workload matters. Caseloads below 25 students per mentor, paired with protected time for guidance, produced the best outcomes across every country studied.
Relationships matter most of all. The quality of the mentor and student bond predicted program success more than funding, curriculum, or policy design. Schools with high-trust mentoring cultures saw student engagement rise by 18 to 22 percent and school belonging climb by 30 percent.
These findings map closely onto the design principles behind MentorPRO. The cross-national evidence shows that mentoring succeeds when specific mentors are assigned to specific students, when meetings are scheduled rather than improvised, and when mentors follow a structured plan supported by training and institutional backing. MentorPRO was built around exactly these conditions. The platform assigns dedicated mentors, schedules and tracks consistent check-ins, and gives mentors evidence-based tools and training that reduce the role ambiguity and emotional labor the authors flag as persistent risks from the UK to East Asia.
The study also surfaces a tension that MentorPRO is designed to resolve. Centralized systems produce consistency but risk overload, while decentralized advisory models build strong relationships but suffer from uneven quality. MentorPRO offers a middle path by providing structured routines, measurement, and fidelity supports while preserving the relational autonomy that makes mentoring meaningful. When the researchers describe Finland’s welfare teams and Singapore’s co-mentorship models as exemplars of sustainability, they are describing the kind of distributed, team-based support that MentorPRO enables for schools and youth-serving organizations that cannot staff those structures alone.
The takeaway is straightforward. Mentoring works when it is treated as core institutional architecture rather than an add-o. That requires clear roles, manageable caseloads, protected time, trained mentors, and a culture of trust. Technology cannot replace any of those ingredients, but the right platform can make them achievable at scale. That is what we are working to deliver every day at MentorPRO.
Reference
Risdiyanto, R., Hernawan, A. H., Johan, R. C., and Fadlilah, A. F. (2026). A comparative analysis of the student mentoring system in secondary education. Inovasi Kurikulum, 23(2), 361 to 376. https://doi.org/10.64014/jik.v23i2.269
