Free university application mentoring for Year 12 and 13 UK Home students from structurally disadvantaged backgrounds, including low-income, Free School Meal–eligible, and care-experienced students.

The YEI Access & Mentoring Programme was founded on a simple observation:

Academic ability is widely distributed, but access to high-quality guidance and instruction is not.

Despite coming from a low-income, care-experienced background, experiencing periods of homelessness, and having been educated at the only further education college in the UK to receive an ‘Inadequate’ Ofsted rating in 2024, I progressed to offers from leading UK institutions without the consistent and extensive private tuition and admissions support routinely available to more advantaged students.

This was not because the system worked well, but because I was lucky enough to meet people who took the time to guide me when I had no structured support, and I am forever indebted to them.

At the same time, I saw many students with the ability to reach and excel at leading universities who lacked consistent academic and admissions support, and whose outcomes were shaped by that absence rather than by any limitation in ability.

As an economist at heart, I see this imbalance not only as a question of fairness or meritocratic integrity, but as one of allocative efficiency.

When access to elite educational institutions is shaped by income rather than ability, talent is imperfectly matched to opportunity, and some potential inevitably goes underdeveloped.

YEI Access is my attempt to contribute constructively by extending the support that made my own progression possible, in gratitude to the many individuals who took the time to guide and support me when I had none, not as charity, but as responsibility, and by playing a small role in ensuring that ability, wherever it is found, has a clearer pathway to the institutions where it can be most fully developed.


Hanzallah Hanif
Founder, Young Economists Initiative (YEI).

Our Mentors & Academic Backgrounds

The YEI Access & Mentoring Programme is a peer-led mentoring collective.

Our mentors are students who have recently navigated competitive UK university admissions and A-level examinations, and who now support Year 12 and Year 13 students through free tuition and UCAS mentoring.

Our mentors have received offers from, or are currently studying at, a range of leading UK universities, including:

• University of Oxford
• University of Cambridge
• London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)
• Imperial College London
• University College London (UCL)
• University of Warwick
• King’s College London (KCL)
• University of Durham
• University of Edinburgh
• University of St Andrews
• University of Bath
• University of Bristol

These academic backgrounds reflect the mentors’ own progression through competitive admissions processes and inform the guidance they provide.

While we aim to support students across a range of subjects, YEI Access’s core strength lies in Economics, PPE, Politics, Philosophy, History, Geography, and Mathematics.

We will always try to match students with an appropriate mentor, but subject availability may vary.

Applications can be submitted using the form below.

Click here!