Someone Who Looks Like Where You're From
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The REACH Review — Issue 2
By Danny Blaney, Founder, REACH Competitions
There is a version of the role model argument that is almost entirely useless. It is the version that puts a famous face on a poster, hangs it in a classroom, and calls the job done. The assumption is that inspiration works by proximity — that a young person from a deprived background will see someone successful, feel motivated, and revise their behaviour accordingly. It is a theory of change that flatters the people implementing it while demanding almost nothing of them.
The science tells a considerably more complicated and more useful story.
Role models do not work through inspiration alone. They work through something more fundamental: the revision of what a person believes is possible for someone like them. That distinction matters enormously, because the ceiling a young person places on their own future is not just a feeling — it is a cognitive framework that shapes every decision they make, including the ones that look, from the outside, like a failure of character.
The science of possible
Psychologists refer to this through the lens of expectancy-value theory — the idea that motivation is driven not just by how much someone wants an outcome, but by how likely they believe that outcome is for a person in their position. For young people growing up in poverty, that expectancy is systematically suppressed. Not by laziness or lack of ambition, but by the rational processing of everything their environment has shown them about what people from their postcode tend to become.
Research published in Nature Human Behaviour found that economic inequality directly shapes the mobility expectations of disadvantaged young people — and that lower expectations translate directly into lower-effort behaviours. The problem is not that these young people don't want more. It is that their environment has given them no compelling reason to believe more is achievable.
This is where representation does its real work — not as inspiration but as evidence. A role model from the same background, the same type of estate, the same kind of school, does not merely make a young person feel good. They constitute proof of concept. They update the expectancy calculation. Research consistently shows that role models perceived as genuinely similar to the observer — not just demographically, but in terms of the specific circumstances they came from — are significantly more effective at shifting motivation and goal-setting than high-profile figures who appear to occupy a world entirely removed from the observer's own.
A 2022 study published in PMC found a clear association between having a positive role model and elevated self-esteem, improved school performance, and resilience — with the effects strongest when the young person knew their role model personally or perceived them as coming from a genuinely similar background. A 2001 survey of 100,000 middle and high school students found that only around one in four reported having a positive adult role model in their lives at all. In deprived communities, where high-status local figures are disproportionately likely to model criminal rather than constructive behaviour, that absence is not a minor inconvenience. It is a structuring condition.
The mentor distinction
Role models and mentors are related but not the same thing, and the difference is worth being precise about.
A role model expands the ceiling. A mentor shows you the stairs.
The Youth Endowment Fund's research on mentoring programmes draws on a broad evidence base and reaches a consistent conclusion: mentoring reduces violence by an average of 21%, all offending by 14%, and reoffending by 19%. It is likely to produce positive effects on substance misuse, behavioural difficulties, educational outcomes, and self-esteem. Those are not marginal numbers. They represent a meaningful, documented shift in the trajectories of young people who, by the standard statistical predictions of their environment, were heading somewhere considerably worse.
The mechanism matters. Mentoring works not primarily through the transfer of skills or knowledge, but through the provision of something far more basic: a reliable, invested adult who shows up consistently and provides emotional stability during the periods when adolescent identity is most malleable and most at risk. Research from Children and Youth Services Review found that mentoring programmes foster certainty through predictability and enduring relationships — and that it is precisely this consistency, not the content of any particular session, that drives the most durable outcomes.
The coach in a community boxing gym or a local football club is, in many cases, exactly this figure — without the formal label. They are present at the hours when young people are most likely to be unsupervised. They hold young people to a standard. They notice when someone stops coming. That last part is not a small thing: the act of being noticed, of having your absence registered by a reliable adult, is something that a significant proportion of young people in deprived communities do not reliably experience anywhere else.
The deprivation multiplier
The evidence on role models and mentorship is broadly applicable across socioeconomic groups. But the effect size is not uniform. For young people in deprived communities — where home environments are more likely to be unstable, where schools are more likely to be overstretched, and where the dominant local models of success may be rooted in criminality rather than legitimate achievement — the presence of a trusted adult outside that system carries disproportionate weight.
Research on adolescents exposed to negative nonparental adult influences found that role models provided protective effects on externalising and internalising behaviours — meaning they actively buffered against the damage done by negative environmental models, rather than simply adding a positive influence on top of a neutral baseline. The worse the environment, in other words, the more a single positive figure can count.
This is the multiplier that the closure of youth centres and the defunding of community sport does not adequately account for. It is not just structured activity that disappears when a youth club shuts or a community sports programme loses funding. It is the adults who ran them — the coaches, the youth workers, the people who were present in the gap between the school day ending and the front door opening. Their absence does not leave a neutral space. It leaves a space that gets filled by something else.
The proof in the pattern
Anthony Joshua walked into Finchley Amateur Boxing Club at the age of eighteen, seeking, in his coach Sean Murphy's words, a path away from trouble on the streets. Murphy has spoken directly about what the relationship required — not just technical coaching, but persistent pursuit. When Joshua went missing from the gym, Murphy tracked him down. When Joshua's mother rang to say her son was mixing with the wrong people, Murphy rang him directly. The intervention was not a programme or a policy. It was an adult who gave enough of a damn to notice, and to chase.
Murphy later reflected: "Most of the kids who come into boxing are working class. They need someone to look up to... We've got a lot of kids with one-parent families who, straight away, have no father figure there." That observation, from a coach in a North London amateur club, is a more precise description of the role model effect than most academic definitions.
Marcus Rashford's story runs along the same structural lines. Raised by a single mother in Wythenshawe who worked multiple jobs to keep the family afloat, food insecurity was not a policy debate for the Rashfords — it was a daily reality. Rashford joined Manchester United's academy at seven, and the coaches and structures he encountered there did not simply develop a footballer. They provided a consistent, high-standard environment at an age when the alternative — given the deprivation statistics of Wythenshawe — was statistically bleak. United's head of academy Nick Cox, reflecting on Rashford's development, noted that young players at the academy begin to see success as normal because they are surrounded by others who have achieved it from similar backgrounds: "It slowly becomes normal, it slowly becomes just following in the footsteps of a pal rather than trying to follow that which looks impossible, by someone who looks so different to me."
That is the role model effect, stated plainly by a practitioner. Not a poster. Not an assembly speech. A living, proximate example from a recognisable background, making the destination feel reachable rather than theoretical.
On ownership
There is a version of this argument that, taken too far, removes agency entirely from the young people it is trying to help. It implies that outcomes are purely environmental — that given the right role model, the right mentor, the right community sport programme, the trajectory is effectively determined. That version is both scientifically incomplete and, frankly, a disservice to the people it describes.
The environment shapes probability. It does not determine destiny.
What role models and mentors actually do, at their most effective, is not rescue anyone. They expand the range of options a young person can genuinely conceive of for themselves, and they provide enough structural stability for the harder work of personal ownership to take place. The shift from fatalism to agency — the point at which a young person stops reading their circumstances as a life sentence and starts treating them as a starting condition — is not something that can be externally imposed. It has to be chosen. What the evidence argues, consistently and clearly, is that certain conditions make that choice more likely to be made.
Deprivation narrows those conditions. Role models, mentors, and accessible community sport widen them back out. The rest, as it always has been, is down to the individual.
REACH exists to influence the conditions. What young people do with them is entirely their own.
Sources: Nature Human Behaviour (2019); PMC — The Impact of Role Models, Mentors and Heroes on Academic and Social Outcomes in Adolescents (2022); Youth Endowment Fund Mentoring Toolkit; Children and Youth Services Review (2025); Education and Behavior; Sky Sports; Boxing News Online; Manchester United
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