NEXT year, the charity Oasis is to open two “therapeutic centres” in former schools in south London and Merseyside (News, 21 July). The Revd Steve Chalke, the charity’s founder, admits that he is as much daunted as excited by the prospect.
State education in England “is now running on fumes”, he says. In 2021-22, approximately 40,000 teachers — almost one in 11 — left the profession for reasons other than retirement. “Why are they leaving? They care about children and want to nurture them, but they get bogged down in bureaucracy, and now their classrooms are stripped of resources.
“Increasingly, schools can no longer afford teaching assistants; so children who are atypical learners don’t receive the personalised care they need.”
The exam system has become a straitjacket, he says. “It’s too narrow a way of measuring children’s ability. What if their gifts are not reading and writing? What if they’re creative, or entrepreneurial, or collaborative?”
One in three children leaves school feeling that they are a failure because they haven’t got the required grades, he says. (Mr Chalke notes that Lord Baker, who, as Secretary of State for Education, introduced GCSEs in the mid-1980s, is now an “ardent” campaigner for their abolition.)
There are other problems besides. “I talk to a lot of educational leaders,” he says, “and I think they would all say that the pressure on schools in terms of young people’s wider emotional, social, and mental health is absolutely huge.” Issues including “county lines”, grooming, bullying on social media, teenage depression, and self-harm.
The situation has worsened since the arrival of Covid. In 2022-23, almost 1.8 million children of compulsory school age have been “persistently absent” — missing at least ten per cent of their lessons — and 125,000 “severely absent” have missed more than half.
KINGSMEAD SCHOOL, in Hoylake, Wirral, founded in 1904, was closed in 2020 as a result of low pupil numbers, exacerbated by the pandemic. St Martin-in-the-Fields High School for Girls, in Lambeth, which was founded in 1699 by a future Archbishop of Canterbury, is to close next year, owing to a shortfall of school-age children.
In both instances, the trustees approached Mr Chalke to ask what Oasis might do with their premises in partnership with them, which would “stay true to the vision of the founder and yet meet 21st-century needs”.
Revd Steve Chalke at the Oasis Restore site with members of staff from the construction company
It did not take long to come up with a proposal, Mr Chalke says. “This vision is what we live and breathe at Oasis.”
In effect, the two new centres will be a response to last year’s Green Paper on special educational needs and disabilities, and alternative provision. This reported that many young people who had learning difficulties, or had been traumatised by adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) such as poverty, malnutrition, violence, or abuse, were not being served well by our current educational system.
“They tend to feel that they don’t fit in,” Mr Chalke explains; “so their behaviour can become anti-social. All behaviour is a form of communication. So, they kick off; and you then get all these parents saying they’re going to take their children out of the school unless this one child is removed.
“The staff know enough about trauma to know there is always something going on beneath the surface, but not enough to be able to understand what triggers this child specifically — nor do they have the resources to cope with their behaviour, anyway. And so the child ends up being sanctioned.”
Once a child is labelled a failure, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, he says. “They get endless detentions, demerits, fixed-term exclusions, and, eventually, a permanent exclusion. They’re sent to a pupil referral unit, or miss out on education altogether, and all too often end up in the justice system. It’s sometimes called ‘the school-to-prison pipeline’.” About 80 per cent of young adults currently in custody were once excluded from school.
To arrest this process, the Green Paper proposed the setting up of centres, such as those that Oasis is planning, which can provide assistance to surrounding schools. Their interventions would be at three levels, Mr Chalke says.
“At level one, we’ll work with another school to support a child who is struggling, with the goal of helping them to understand why they lose it, so that they become better able to self-regulate. At the same time, we’ll help their teachers to understand what triggers them, and how to de-escalate things more effectively.
“Some children need to come out of school for a day or an afternoon a week, just to calm down and regain equilibrium. For example, in central London, Oasis runs a city farm. If a kid is kicking off in class, they can go and spend an afternoon there; they muck out the pigs, water the crops, or whatever, and spend time in the open air with our youth workers. We repair and return them, if you like; but we’ll continue to work with them and their teachers. That’s level two.
St Martin-in-the-Fields High School for Girls, in Tulse Hill, a former school which will reopen as a therapeutic school
“Finally, some children need a much longer period out of school, because their trauma is so deep that they’re always going to struggle in a classroom with a lot of other kids. So, we’ll give them a longer-term therapeutic opportunity. In both centres, we are hoping also to provide residential care for some who can no longer stay at home, and have nowhere else suitable to live. That’s level three.”
Planning is still in the very early stages, Mr Chalke says, and the exact mix of provision has yet to be decided, but “at levels two and three, you’re talking about a class size of five or six.”
What the country needs, he believes, is “dozens of such centres”. Oasis is currently considering setting up other models of this work in Croydon, Bristol, and Salisbury, among other places.
THE object of these centres is to prevent young people sliding into the “school-to-prison pipeline”; but, inevitably, some will. Engaging with them is the purpose of Oasis Restore, England’s first-ever “secure school”, which will open in Rochester next March. It will care for up to 49 children (aged 12-18) who are on remand or who have received custodial sentences. There are currently some 500 children in this situation in England.
At present, young males in custody are sent to one of five young-offender institutions (YOIs): Cookham Wood, Feltham, Parc, Werrington, and Wetherby. There, they may be locked in their cells for 20 hours a day.
“Will that ensure that when one day they’re released — which they will be — they’ll be happier in themselves and more productive?” Mr Chalke asks. “The answer is no. The experience desocialises and stigmatises them, robs them of communication skills, and loads them with rage, so that they’ll only be more of a threat to society.”
He characterises the new school’s approach as “relentless love”. (When he said this to one member of the House of Lords, the peer “looked slightly shocked and said: ‘Relentless love and what?’”)
Oasis runs a housing project for care-leavers in south London, which was Mr Chalke’s very first venture, almost 40 years ago. “These young people have not been sentenced,” he says, “but they’re the same kind of people [as are placed in YOIs]. When they first arrive, they often won’t look at you, or say please or thank you; they’re rude and anti-social and can be extremely aggressive.
“Way back in the ’80s, before anyone talked of ACEs, I learnt something, though it took me ages to work it out. If someone had a broken arm or a broken leg, I’d compensate for them because they’re carrying an injury. Well, these young people have wounds inside their heads.”
His team at Oasis has done extensive research. “I have spent huge amounts of time myself, almost every day, with people who have been through the youth justice system themselves. Now we employ some of them. All of them will tell you that the harshness of jail does not do anything, except make you angrier. Our present system doesn’t work.”
A lot of thought has been put into a radical refurbishment of the building in Rochester, which used to be the G4S-run Medway Secure Training Centre. There are now no bars, though the windows have strengthened glass. There are no cells with steel doors, just bedrooms. Instead of warders, there will be youth workers. Until 10 p.m., the students will be socialising and learning. Their bedroom doors will be locked, but only at night, both for their own security and to protect others.
The Revd Steve Chalke
The approach will be “holistic and ‘trauma-responsive’”, Mr Chalke says. “Theologically, it will embody, if you like, New Testament thinking about grace and redemption rather than the Old Testament’s ‘an eye for an eye’. In terms of neuroscience, it’s a 21st-century response to poorly regulated and criminal behaviour rather than a 19th-century one. We now know that people show extreme anti-social behaviour when their brains have not developed typically, because of what’s happened to them in childhood.”
Many of the young people in Oasis Restore will have committed very serious and violent crimes, he says. “We’re not minimising that. Relentless love is not namby-pamby. It requires the investment of huge amounts of time, talking with them about what happened, and how it happened. It’s important, for both them and their victim, to work through their crime therapeutically with them. Hopefully, it will bring them to wholeness, but at least it will open the door to healing.”
Kingsmead School, Hoylake, on the Wirral, a former school which is to open as a therapeutic school
Mr Chalke’s latest book, A Manifesto For Hope: Ten principles for transforming the lives of children and young people, published by SPCK in August, was written after two pupils at Oasis schools were murdered: one stabbed to death by a teenager, the other, a five-year-old, killed by their own mother. “It was very sobering,” he admits.
“I don’t see Oasis through rose-tinted spectacles. I know our weaknesses. I know that people will judge us on our results. But all my experience, as a man travelling through life and as the pastor of a church, is that, slowly but surely, most people respond to love.”