The Secretary of State for Justice says he is confident a new secure school for young offenders is the right solution for the UK’s “failing” youth custody provision.
Dominic Raab visited the construction site at the former secure training centre in Rochester, Kent, which is being converted into the first secure school in the UK.
It is described as a school within a prison, whereas existing youth custody facilities have less focus on education.
The visit comes weeks after the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) published a report into youth custody provision which concluded the Ministry of Justice’s efforts were “failing children”.
The cross-party committee of MPs also criticised the lack of a clear and convincing strategy for making improvements to youth custody provision, the cost of the Medway secure school spiralling from £4.9 million to £40 million, and the opening of the school being pushed back from 2020 to as late as February 2024.
“The problems will have been at home, there may have been mental health problems, and frankly a wholesale lack of education for some of these young people, and we’re catching them late, I can’t pretend otherwise. Education, councils and social services have not been able to pick them up in their safety nets.
“We’ve got to do something quite radical and concerted and bold, and that is to make sure they have an environment which is going to be very disciplined and quite exacting.
“I accept the diagnosis from the PAC, and this is an answer based on empirical experience at home and abroad – the US, Spain, Scandinavian jurisdictions – to try and do something different for these core, hard-to-reach, stubborn group of young people who have often been through a pretty hellish time and done some pretty bad things, but we’ve got to turn that around.”
The secure school, called Oasis Restore, will be run by the Oasis Charitable Trust which already has 52 academies across five regions of the UK.
This is like nothing Oasis has done before, but founder Steve Chalke says ideally all child custody facilities should be run like this in future.
He said: “Oasis Restore truly is a revolution in youth justice because it’s driven by our growing understanding of brain science – how young peoples’ brains are formed.
“You can’t help somebody by harming them, you can’t take those who have been psychologically wounded through trauma and somehow hope that by punishing them and locking them up for long enough they’ll emerge renewed people, it doesn’t work.
“The first secure school can’t be the only secure school. Oasis Restore needs to be the blueprint for every youth custodial estate. This way of working with young people has to become the only way. This is the first secure school and it won’t be the last.”
