‘I was just a shy, scared kid who needed somebody to believe in him’

MEET Billy Mcmillan. Nineteen years old. Student of politics. Lover of books. He’s just finished The Outsider by Albert Camus and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He’s also working his way round the world, book by book, consuming the classics of every country he can think of. It’s an exciting time for him. The brain is buzzing. The possibilities are opening up. Who knows what will happen next.

But it could have been different. Five years ago, Billy was a pupil at Lochend High School in Easterhouse in

Glasgow and things were not looking good. He couldn’t spell or read fluently; he couldn’t ride a bike or tie his own shoelaces; and his confidence was non-existent. He was acting up in class; disengaged, bored, and, by the looks of it, unlikely to achieve anything academically.

Had Billy been from a middle-class background – Jordanhill rather than Easterhouse – no doubt something would have been done about the situation. His parents would have intervened and got him a tutor maybe, or drummed it into him that he needed to buck up his act if he wanted to get to university.

However, there was nothing like that for Billy. His dad was a heroin addict and had done a spell in prison. He also spent time in care and there were no adults to help him, or guide him, and certainly no one was suggesting the possibility of university. “The concept of going to university when you come from Easterhouse sounds impossible,” says Billy.

And yet five years on, here he is, a student of politics at the University of the West of Scotland – an achievement largely due to a remarkable project to match up pupils in difficult circumstances with mentors who can help them realise their potential.

The organisation behind the mentoring scheme, MCR Pathways, was established 11 years ago by the Glaswegian businessman Iain Macritchie and now has 600 mentors working with pupils in Scottish schools. Some of the pupils being mentored have experience of the care system; some may be living in poverty or with families where drugs and alcohol are wreaking havoc. Whatever it is, if the child has potential, the aim of MCR Pathways is to realise it.

Billy’s mentor was, and is, 71-yearold former teacher Mary Hunter Toner and I’m meeting them both at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow where they tell me about their first cautious, shy meetings. I ask Billy to describe what he was like back then.

“I was just a shy, scared wee kid who just needed somebody to believe in him in a sense or support him and be less of a negative force,” he says. “Because there’s a lot of that, there’s a lot of talking down to people in Easterhouse, especially from people who are older to people who are younger. There’s that generational thing of ‘you can’t do that’. The West of Scotland Presbyterian mentality of you’ll never amount to anything: ‘look at the people you come from and the area you come from’.”

However, Mary, a former primary headteacher, says as soon as she met Billy, she could see he had the potential to break free from this lack of expectation. “In secondary school, they spotted Billy’s ability, but it was being thwarted by his dyslexia or his difficulty around writing,” she says. “But, in general, they knew, and I have always taken my hat off to the teachers, because they identified that he had a very good brain. It was obvious in as much that he was good at art and good at maths, but his bete noire was English.”

Billy’s way of coping was to try to hide where he was struggling. He would deliberately make his handwriting messy so people couldn’t spot the spelling mistakes. He also did what thousands of other schoolkids do when they are disengaged or bored: he made jokes and became the class comedian. If they’re laughing with you, they are not making fun of you.

But the danger signs were there. “It could have easily gone the other way,” says Billy, “But Mary looked at everything I’d done and marked out where the issues are. She didn’t tell me where to go, but she did show me where I had to work and where to go from there. Drugs or crime – you could argue I could have gone down that road, but I’ve seen it so much in Easterhouse. My father was a heroin addict. I’ve seen it so much in that sense – it would have been too easy to go down that route.”

The technique Mary used was the one that all the MCR mentors are taught to use: make a connection first rather than tell the young person what they should be doing with their life. First off, both Billy and Mary discovered they had a shared interest in calligraphy; they also both knew Easterhouse well – Billy lived there and Mary had taught there for a time. They also went to the library where, gradually, Billy started talking about the subjects and books he was interested in. That’s when Mary started to see Billy develop what he had been lacking: self-belief.

Iain Macritchie has seen this kind of result many times – indeed, the young woman he mentors himself has gone from living in a homeless unit to studying medicine at university. “She had every challenge against her,” says Iain. “And I have done nothing other than being a constant for her.”

This is the central idea of MCR Pathways: to provide a constant adult in a young person’s life – and it’s had remarkable results. Before it started to work in Glasgow, 48 per cent of young people with experience of care went on to college, university or a job after school. Now, 11 years after the start of MCR Pathways, it is 81 per cent. Iain is so proud of that figure, he has it painted on the wall of his office.

At first you might wonder why Iain