Enacting coproduction through mentoring: developing mental health literacy through a sport, art and education-based programme

While coproduction is increasingly used across sport, health, and education, much less is known about mentoring within coproduced programmes. This paper examines mentors’ experiences of delivering Tackling the Blues, a sport-, art-, and education-based mental health literacy (MHL) programme in schools across north-west England during the 2022/23 academic year. Data were generated through six focus groups with 22 mentors. Findings demonstrate that mentoring was the process through which coproduction was enacted in practice, requiring mentors to negotiate theoretical, tacit, and experiential knowledge while translating MHL into contextually relevant learning experiences. Although coproduction supported more relational and responsive approaches to MHL, it also generated new demands relating to role expectations, pedagogical practice, and the delivery of sensitive content. The findings position mentoring as a key mechanism of coproduction and highlight the need to consider how mentors are prepared and supported within coproduced sport-based programmes.