At school, Nick Tepper was a smart kid who behaved badly in class – though he stayed in school because he wanted to go to university.

Fast forward, Tepper is a 24-year-old Queensland University of Technology graduate who wants more kids to stay in school.

So he developed an idea to enter in Uniting’s IdeasGen competition and it’s relatively simple: connect school students who are thinking of dropping out with mentors who are in the early-to-mid-twenties age bracket and who once wanted to quit school themselves.