Construction has begun on the UK’s first ‘safe school’ where young people will receive ‘mindfulness’ sessions and a strict curriculum to keep them away from crime.
Justice Secretary Dominic Raab said the “radical” institution is being built on the former Medway Secure Training Unit in Knows would help to reduce crime among a core of young people.
The site has been described as a “school in a prison” where it is hoped that a strict routine and core subjects such as English and Mathematics and Vocational young offenders turn their lives around.
The children will have apartment rooms with en-suite showers and televisions instead of cells and access to a sports hall, gym and football field.
Existing juvenile detention centers are less focused on education.
Mr Raab said the number of children in juvenile detention has fallen from 2,000 to 500 in ten years, more needs to be done.
“We have to do something very radical, coordinated and daring, and that is to ensure that they have an environment that is going to be very disciplined and quite demanding,” he said.
“For young people who have not sat properly, have gone through a curriculum and have spent the day learning, this will be a big change for them, but if we can support them and require them to have a school day and learn skills that they never learned before, we have the opportunity to break that cycle.”
The secure school, called Oasis Restore, will be run by the Oasis Charitable Trust, which already has 52 academies in five regions of the UK.
While it’s unlike anything Oasis has done before, founder Steve Chalke said ideally all child custody facilities should be managed in the same way in the future.
He said: “The vast majority of young people in prison in the justice system are children who have struggled with life, they have been abandoned, they have been abused, they have been through traumatic experiences.
“You can’t help someone by hurting them, you can’t take those who have been psychologically injured by trauma and somehow hope that by punishing them and imprisoning them long enough, they will become renewed people.” , it does not work .”
Earlier this month, the cross-party Public Accounts Committee (PAC) released a report on the child custody provision, which concluded that the Justice Department’s efforts were “failing children.”
In response, Mr Raab said it was best to “try to do something different for this core, hard-to-reach, stubborn group of young people”.
The school is expected to hold 49 juvenile delinquents, and the school will be operational in 2024.