Definitely Maybe: Will We Ever Get Secure Schools?

  

Back in 2016, the government said that failing detention facilities for children -Young Offender Institutions (YOIs) and Secure Training Centres (STCs)- should be replaced by a new generation of Secure Schools. How’s progress?

Glacial is too generous.

Prisons Minister Victoria Atkins told MPs on the Justice Committee last week that she’d like to get the first children into the first school at Medway early in 2024. “We are now on the road to construction” she claimed, confirming that expected costs of adapting what was the first STC have risen sevenfold to £36 million.

Across the road her Ministry of Justice (MoJ) officials were explaining to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) that the building was not all that is under construction. The funding agreement with Oasis Restore, appointed in 2019 to run the Medway Secure School is still being designed.  As for a second school, officials admitted they haven’t yet done the planning for that.  Medway is a pathfinder, which Ms Atkins said, “we will be evaluating … very, very carefully”.

Reasons for the delay have included the need to ensure Oasis, as a charity, can lawfully run a child prison and to reach decisions about the spec for the building. But with a bit more political will, it’s hard to see why Medway couldn’t have been ready to start work a good deal sooner.  

As I wrote in evidence to the PAC, I’ve never really understood why a new model of youth custody is being developed in the shape of the Secure School when there is a perfectly good existing one in the form of Secure Childrens Homes (SCHs). SCHs provide by far the best quality of care in the existing youth custody estate, accommodating a variety of children whose liberty needs to be restricted whether because of criminal offending or to protect them from harm. Since 2002, 16 SCHs have closed. Would the MoJ not do better to contribute to an expansion of the proven model of SCHs rather than invent a costly and risky new one? The Education Department is already creating additional places in secure homes.  

At the Justice Committee, Ms Atkins pointed to complexities with SCH’s, arguing that since they rightly risk assess young people and decide whether or not they can manage that young person well, “we have to have options other than secure children’s homes”. 

But the Head of the Youth Custody Service made clear to the PAC that once the Secure School is running “it is entirely possible that Oasis say, “No, given the mix and the risk of the population we have, we might not be able to take this particular child.”   

A youth estate consisting of secure schools and SCH’s will always need some sort of backstop. 

It may be the recognition of this fact that accounts for what looks like a scaling back of ambitions for Secure Schools. Spiralling costs and a harsher Conservative approach to crime may also be causing ministers to have second thoughts.  Ms Atkins description of Secure Schools as “a pretty radical policy” and a “really brave effort” hinted to me at least, at the possibility if not of pulling the plug completely, then limiting the experiment to Medway.   

Officials were more positive about a “completely innovative” attempt to take a “really transformative vision”. But they admitted that their Department's commitment is only to trialling Secure Schools and  the Permanent Secretary made clear that “we are completely committed to the existing sector, because the vast majority of children are looked after within the YOIs and the STCs”.

Five and a half years after the Taylor Review of Youth Justice recommended fundamental change to the current youth custody system, the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care described  the state of child detention as abysmal, recommending that YOIs and STCs should be phased out within the next ten years and replaced by local secure children’s homes or Secure Schools.

The MoJ’s track record suggests that even if the recommendation is accepted, it won’t be delivered. The Social Care Review also proposed that youth justice policy should be moved to the Department for Education. This is something I called for when I left the Youth Justice Board in 2006. Unless it happens, I can’t see any major change to the way we lock up children.