Violent young offenders start day with yoga at new facility

Mindfulness and learning at heart of £186,000 per head secure school aiming to recreate ‘family home’

SOME of Britain’s most violent teenagers will be given yoga and mindfulness classes at the UK’S first school within a prison.

The children – convicted of murder, rape and other serious offences – will have teachers and youth workers instead of prison warders, rooms with en-suite showers and TVS instead of cells, and access to a sports hall, gym and football pitch.

The “secure school” in Kent – unveiled this weekend by Dominic Raab, the Justice Secretary, as a “radical” attempt to rehabilitate Britain’s hardest core of young criminals – aims to recreate a “family home” where they can pursue a 9am-3pm school day behind perimeter fences.

At a cost to the taxpayer of at least £186,000 per child per year – nearly four times the £48,500 annual fees of Eton College – it will have the lowest staff-student ratio in Britain at two teachers per five to eight offenders.

When it opens in February 2024, the school – built on the site of the first ever Borstal in Medway – will have 200 staff to 49 young offenders of both sexes drawn from the “hardcore” of 500 under 18s whose crimes are so serious that they have been locked up to protect the public.

On a visit to the site, Mr Raab told The Daily Telegraph: “It is not going to be a soft option here. They’ve lost their freedom. They’re away from their friends and their families.

“But what they will have is a chance to learn from dawn to dusk, to stay physically fit and to work on things which will give them practical vocational skills.”

He said it was “radical” but, if successful, could become a model for turning round the lives of the 500 most “stubborn, difficult-to-reach” young offenders. Nearly two thirds of inmates reoffend after leaving youth custody, compared with 42 per cent of all other ex-prisoners.

The alternative, he said, was to “keep trying to bang our heads against all the things that we know don’t work at massive costs to our society”.

Mr Raab said he had no qualms about early-morning yoga because “if you start the day in a calm way, you have an opportunity to do the learning.”

“I’ve got two young boys and it’s always bedlam first thing in the morning and they’ve got all the right chances God could give,” he said.

Celia Sadie, head of wellbeing at the facility, said when she introduced yoga to the young offenders at the Medway secure training centre, which closed in 2020, she said they leapt at it.

“It went really well once they got over their initial uncertainty and perception it was a middle-aged white ladies’ thing,” she said. “There’s quite a good evidence base of it working with children in that physical way.”

The concept of a school within a jail was the brainchild of Charlie Taylor,

‘It went really well once they got over their uncertainty it was a middle-aged white ladies’ thing’

chief inspector of prisons, and was given the go ahead after research on similar models in the United States, Scandinavia and Spain.

It will be run by Oasis, one of Britain’s biggest academy chains, as a school rather than by the prison service. There will be no warders.

Instead, teachers, youth and social workers, psychologists and therapists will be trained in de-escalation and other techniques to handle any violence.

Entering the secure school will be like arriving at any other prison with X-ray searches for drugs or weapons and 24/7 centrally-monitored CCTV on all exits. But once inside it will be more like a university campus or boarding school than a jail.

“We are creating a space that will function like a family even though we know we are not their parents,” said Andrew Willetts, the school’s principal.