Netherhall House teamed up with ReachOut! For Youth to launch a mentoring programme in a primary school in Hackney, in East London. Students from Netherhall House work as mentors for boys in the last year of primary school, travelling weekly to the school and spending Wednesday afternoons with children in a variety of academic and sporting activities.

ReachOut! London is funded by the Children's Fund at the Learning Trust in Hackney.

ReachOut! for Youth started in Manchester in 1994 with a project in Moss Side, and now operates several projects in the Manchester area, while expanding to other cities in the country.

The aims of ReachOut! are to engage children and young people in the learning process, to provoke curiosity, to discover their abilities, to improve confidence and communication skills, to make learning fun and interesting, to help them see themselves as the students of the future and to encourage them to invest commitment and effort to achieve the best they can. ReachOut! ensures that the mentors are adequately trained and that they have the ongoing support required to discharge properly their duties as mentors on a week-by-week basis.

The mentors are university students who befriend, advise and help the young people to grow in confidence and trust, to discover and develop their talents. The student mentors act as role models, and through that contact help the children or young teenagers to think about the possibility of tertiary education which many of them, because of their backgrounds, would not otherwise contemplate. The mentors also help them discover that learning can be fun and that with a little effort on their part they can aim much higher.