Inside the new school for Britain’s most dangerous children
Last week, The Times wrote an in-depth piece exploring Oasis Restore, the UK’s first ever Secure School that we launched earlier this year. The piece, written by Rachel Sylvester, explores what being at the school is like and our philosophy underpinning it.
You can't hurt to heal
Last week, The Times wrote an in-depth piece exploring Oasis Restore, the UK’s first ever Secure School that we launched earlier this year. The piece, written by Rachel Sylvester, explores what being at the school is like and our philosophy underpinning it.
It captures the core of what Oasis Restore is all about: restoration. You can’t hurt someone to heal them. When we work with young people who have committed serious crimes our main question is not ‘what’s wrong with you?’ but ‘what’s happened to you?’.
As the article highlights, our restorative approach is rooted in the latest neuroscientific research showing that our ability to control violent impulses comes from well-developed neural pathways in the brain. And also, that the opposite is true. Our inability to control our violent impulses come from poorly-developed neural pathways – often because of traumatic life experiences. Experiences our students at Oasis Restore are very familiar with.
Therefore, our approach at Oasis Restore is relentless love rather than relentless punishment. To develop healthy neural pathways, we need to form healthy, loving attachments with those around us in a secure and compassionate environment where we feel safe to be ourselves. Many of our young people at Oasis Restore have never experienced this sort of environment. We want to love young people into change. Not punish them into change. It’s our conviction that punishment isn’t want leads to transformation but relationship.
A soft approach?
We understand that our love-centred approach at Oasis Restore will appear quite radical, perhaps even naïve to some – despite our strong foundation in neuroscience. However, as the piece highlights, love is not soft, it’s hard. Rather than being an easy option as Oasis Founder, Steve Chalke, argues, it is actually the most challenging.
The easy option is locking a child away for 23 hours a day and having a cup of tea. The hard option is sitting with the child. Working through their trauma, building a loving relationship, and allowing them to ‘test’ the limits of their trust so they know you are a safe person with whom they can explore their psychological and emotional wounds.
A bigger system
The piece also illuminates where Oasis Restore sits within the broader context of the British prison system. Drawing on reflections from experts – including former Children’s Commissioner and Executive Chair of the Centre for Young Lives, Anne Longfield and former Chief Inspector of Prisons, Nick Hardwick – Sylvester highlights how subversive Oasis Restore truly is compared to other youth prisons.
The article also touches on the controversial topic of the age of criminal responsibility. Did you know that, alongside Wales and Northern Ireland, England has the lowest age of responsibility of any country in Europe at ten years old? We believe this needs to change. An age of responsibility this low lacks compassion and realism. It views children, rather than the broken systems and adverse childhood experiences that have wounded them, as the main problem.
This piece is an excellent articulation of what Oasis Restore is all about. We hope you will read it to gain a deeper understanding of what, we believe, has the potential to transform the youth criminal justice system forever.