Goal 17 receives Princess Royal Training Award for care leaver engagement programme

One of just two organisations with fewer than ten staff to be recognised in 2026 — for a programme built from evidence about what makes mentoring relationships work.

We are proud to share that Goal 17 has been awarded a Princess Royal Training Award 2026 by HRH The Princess Royal and the City & Guilds Foundation.

The Award recognises our Care Leaver Engagement Training Programme — the training we built for our own team after analysing thousands of real mentoring conversations to understand what makes relationships with care-experienced young people succeed.

Fifty-six programmes were recognised this year from 132 applications, across sectors ranging from global security to heritage crafts. Goal 17 is one of only two organisations with fewer than ten staff to be recognised, alongside employers training tens of thousands of people worldwide.

Why we built it

A few years ago, we had a problem we could not solve simply by working harder.

Mentoring relationships with care-experienced young people were not sticking. Only around 30% of young people were engaging regularly with their mentor. More than a third withdrew. Matches took a median of 44 days to make.

We were recruiting good people, training them in the usual ways and still watching too many relationships fall away.

So instead of recruiting harder, we started asking a different question:

What actually makes a mentoring relationship work?

We analysed 7,937 real mentoring conversations to understand what was happening inside successful relationships — how the first message lands, what happens in the silence, when to persist, when to change tack and how trust develops over time.

We turned what we learned into a structured methodology and built that into our Care Leaver Engagement Training Programme. Every single member of the Goal 17 team has completed it.

What changed

• Regular engagement rose from 30% to 82%

• Withdrawal fell from 36% to 2%

• Median time to match a young person with a mentor fell from 44 days to 15

• 69% of young people referred to us as not in education, employment or training moved onto a pathway towards education or work

• Staff turnover went from 50% to zero

The last one matters more than it might appear.

When people understand how to do the hardest part of the job, they stay. And when they stay, young people get consistency.

That is the whole point.

And then we shared what we learned

We did not want this learning to remain inside Goal 17.

We have delivered our training to personal adviser teams in five local authorities. We briefed the Department for Education, published our findings in What Works in Care Leaver Mentoring in May, presented the evidence to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Care-Experienced Children and Young People, and made the report freely available.

Because if we have learned something that can help more care-experienced young people build relationships that last, we believe it should contribute to better practice across the sector.

More than a training programme

For us, the Award is recognition of something bigger than a training programme.

It validates an approach we have been developing for several years: using evidence from real relationships to understand what works, turning that learning into a repeatable method, and continually improving how we support people to build relationships that last.

We believe effective relational support needs more than good intentions. It needs method.

This Award gives us independent recognition that the systems we have built around that principle are working.

This one belongs to the team

Goal 17 has won awards before. This one feels different because it is not about an individual. It recognises the systems and processes our team built, tested and improved together.

Particular credit goes to Beth Wrigley, who designed the methodology and Samantha Briggs, who led us through the assessment process, and supported it at every stage.

Beth will collect the Award at the ceremony in London in January 2027.

What happens next

We are now taking the same evidence-led approach into our volunteer training, so the mentors we recruit can benefit from everything we have learned.

If you are thinking about becoming a mentor, we are currently recruiting in west Kent, Greenwich and south-east London, Southampton, and Northamptonshire.

You will not be connected to a young person and wished luck. You will be trained and supported by a team whose own training has been recognised by HRH The Princess Royal and the City & Guilds Foundation.

[Find out more about volunteering →]

If you commission services for care-experienced young people, we would be glad to talk — about the programme, the evidence behind it, or simply what we have learned about building relationships that last.

Get in touch at team@goal17.global.

Read the full list of 2026 Princess Royal Training Award recipients on the Awards website.