Content warning: This story contains reference to serious violence and self harm

Surrounded by tall trees, with a wide vehicle entrance that leads to its front gates, Vinney Green Secure Children’s Home looks from the outside more like a private school than a prison.

Those who live nearby don’t know much about it. Many I spoke to though, in the surrounding pubs and cafes of the leafy suburb of Emersons Green, reckoned it held one of the two 10-year-olds who murdered Jamie Bulger in 1993.

The two-year-old’s murder in Merseyside was an horrific event, etched into the country’s collective memory. It was a pivotal moment for youth justice too, essentially leading to the abolition of the legal presumption that children aged 10 or over were doli incapax – incapable of evil.

At 10 years old, England and Wales has one of the lowest ages of criminal responsibility in the world – the lowest in Europe. And while the number of children behind bars here has decreased dramatically over the past decade or so, it’s still happening, last year reaching a four-year high according to the latest data.

The youngest of them are held at places like Vinney Green. Sometimes it’s just for a few days or months, but if their sentence is a long one – it’s until they’re old enough, or deemed violent enough to be moved somewhere more severe. 

It’s lunchtime at the unit and, like every area of the building, the cafeteria is always on lockdown. The children come here in small groups and are closely watched by staff. Those who’ve been in conflict are kept apart, made to eat at different times.

The routine usually runs like clockwork, but things can go wrong: today a teenage boy has decided to climb over the counter, into the kitchen, and grab a knife. Nobody was hurt, but the incident is enough to set in motion the boy’s transfer to another unit.

He will be moved to Feltham, a Young Offenders Institution (YOI) on the outskirts of London, where he could be locked in his cell for up to 22 hours a day, and where there is more violence among inmates than any other prison in England – 253 assaults over the past year.

Feltham holds up to 140 young offenders. Vinney Green, which is the second largest of 14 secure children’s homes in the country, can hold 24 at maximum. The staff-to-young person ratio is far higher – one adult to two children – and designed to be safer for vulnerable young people. 

Staff at Vinney Green wished there was another option. “There was this feeling that we’d failed him,” one told me. “Because we knew he would experience a lot stricter, harsher repercussions where he was going.”

In October, Feltham was among three YOIs where the use of PAVA – synthetic pepper spray – was authorised for use by staff. The decision was part of a government initiative to “protect children and members of staff at risk of serious and life changing injuries from incidents of violence”.

The move, which is now subject to a judicial review after it was first announced in April, has faced widespread criticism from youth justice organisations, human rights groups and the Children’s Commissioner. The Youth Justice Board says there is no robust evidence that its use is effective in reducing violence.

From March, the government announced that it would stop placing girls at YOIs altogether. This followed an independent review that raised concerns about the complex physical and mental health needs of girls in custody – who account for more than half of all self-harm incidents in the youth estate despite being less than 2% of the child prison population.

Instead, girls will now be held only at secure children’s homes like Vinney Green, which are mainly run by local authorities and are focused on providing intensive, multidisciplinary support and care. Or at secure schools, which we’ll get to later.

Secure children’s homes are less severe environments than YOIs – providing more specialist care –  but are they always equipped to handle our country’s most vulnerable and violent young people?

It’s early 2022 and a young person at Vinney Green has been in solitary confinement for three days. The lack of documentation provided for the reasons behind this decision amounts to a significant breach of regulations. 

The incident would contribute to the unit being given the lowest possible rating of ‘Inadequate’ by Ofsted, the regulator for education and children’s services, in April that year. 

“Those findings are harrowing. The report found that children were restrained unlawfully and painfully by staff. One child was even locked in a room for three days without justification,” a news presenter reports in a piece-to-camera outside the front gates of the unit.

A place so heavily shielded from public view was now firmly in the spotlight, at least locally. Internally, while there was an overhaul of the unit’s leadership team, the Cable understands, there were also serious conversations about the site being closed down.

The Cable has learned that the child who was kept in solitary confinement for three days was a 14-year-old girl who, in the words of one member of staff, caused “horrific injuries” to others.

The teenager had been taken to a routine medical appointment in hospital, we understand, where she seriously assaulted staff before being returned to Vinney Green. 

“A decision had already been made to move her… When she was settled she was great. But when she wasn’t… we couldn’t possibly manage that,” someone who worked there at the time tells me. “Some are just too tough, too damaged… You can’t undo all of the past.”

The Youth Justice Board agreed that she should be moved to a YOI, and she was held in solitary confinement until a place was made available for her. Moving her there, if that was the only option now, wouldn’t be legal.

YOIs were established in the late 1980s to rehabilitate young people aged 15 and over who were given prison sentences. Campaigners have long said that they are no better than conventional adult prisons in preventing reoffending, and successive governments since have promised reform.

They have remained the most common place for young people in the justice system, however, while secure children’s homes, which are far smaller and more expensive to run, have faced decades of cuts. But in summer 2024, an alternative to YOIs was born in the shape of England’s first secure school: Oasis Restore in Rochester, Kent.

The school is on the site of the former Medway Secure Training Centre, a secure unit that was closed down in 2020 after a series of poor Ofsted inspection ratings, allegations of abuse and excessive force by staff. It was privately run by G4S until 2016, before being taken over by the Ministry of Justice.

Brought in to lead the ambitious project was Steve Chalke, CEO of Oasis, which runs 44 academy schools, one of the largest chains in the country. Chalke’s elevator pitch: enable children aged 12 to 18, who are on remand and sentenced to custody, to live their best lives through education, wellbeing and hope.

It’s a “revolution in youth justice,” Chalke says.

“It’s the environment: it’s the colours on the walls, the fact we’ve got bedrooms not cells, student flats, not wings, and youth workers, not guards,” Chalke tells the Cable. “There are no big steel doors that clang, and there are windows – not bars.”

Put simply, the new secure school is the same as a secure children’s home in terms of aesthetics and care provision. The difference is the size and the scale of the operation, with the government aiming for secure schools and secure children’s homes to replace YOIs and training centres in the longer term.

But there have already been setbacks.

Oasis Restore’s opening was delayed by almost five years, and ran over budget by tens of millions of pounds (from £4.9 million to £36.5 million).

It was temporarily closed down in August after Ofsted uncovered that doors at the facility were so damaged they couldn’t lock, and the children who were held there have been moved to other units around the country. The site is not expected to reopen until March 2026 at the earliest.

Despite the delays and the temporary closure, Chalke is adamant that the secure school model and a focus on providing a therapeutic avenue for young offenders can provide a viable alternative to YOIs.

He condemns policies and practices that are purely punitive, describing the government’s decision to roll out PAVA spray in YOIs as an “extraordinary” backwards step that’s “guaranteed” to erode trust between staff and young people inside. The same can be said, he tells me, of the use of body-worn cameras.

“ We rejected the idea of wearing them… why would anyone trust you in a conversation, tell you their innermost feelings and their pain and their agony if you are wearing a body camera,” he says.

“In my view, love is the only thing that ever changes [violent] behaviour. The violence, the aggression, the silence and unwillingness to engage. All of that is masking internal pain, anxiety, rejection. A therapeutic approach… is about listening to a young person so they feel seen and they feel heard.”

When asked, he refuses to acknowledge that Oasis Restore is a prison. “A young person [told me] he wakes up every morning and thanks God that he’s lucky enough to be here. He meant that he’s safe. Safe from the gang that owned him, that made him carry a knife and deliver drugs – that was his prison. This has set him free.”

Language is important. He didn’t like that I described the unit as a prison, nor that I described those who are held there as children – because some of them are in their late teens.

“They are not adults. However, they have left childhood behind. If you met some of them, calling them a child, that’s not the obvious description that anyone in everyday language would use, and actually it’s quite patronising.”

It goes both ways, though. Adultification – when a young person is perceived as more mature and less vulnerable – is widely considered to be a contributing factor to the overrepresentation of Black and minority ethnic children in particular in the criminal justice system. 

This bias can lead to children being disproportionately subjected to punitive measures, such as being stopped and searched by police, and more likely to be prosecuted or excluded from school.

“It starts with what you might call micro-exclusions, or smaller ostracisation, and then it gradually escalates to bigger and bigger ones,” says Chris Bagley, an educational psychologist. He’s describing what’s known as the school to prison pipeline.

“You might receive a detention, then repeated detentions, and that can then escalate to things like isolations for extended periods. I’ve known some young people, quite disturbingly, to be out of class for days, sometimes weeks at a time in an [isolation] room.”

Bagley has worked as a psychologist at alternative provision schools and secure units, including Vinney Green, where he says almost every child had been through a series of exclusions or some kind of ostracism before falling into criminality. 

More than 10,000 children were permanently excluded from England’s state schools last year, according to government data. There were record numbers of suspensions involving pupils aged six or younger or with special educational needs. The figures for the 2023-24 academic year showed that the number of permanent exclusions increased by 16% compared with the year before, and the total number of suspension days rose by 21% to 955,000.

School exclusions are on the rise for many reasons: the long-term impact of Covid, growing numbers of pupils with special educational needs, rising poverty and the cost-of-living crisis. Schools are also under strain from staff shortages.

Nationally, as it is locally, the fact that children from Black and minority ethnic and working-class communities are disproportionately affected is well documented. As is the link between school exclusions and serious youth violence: excluded teenagers are twice as likely to commit violent crimes, according to research published in March.

In early 2024, three teenage boys were fatally stabbed in Bristol. Mason Rist, 15, and 16-year-old Max Dixon were killed in Knowle West, before Darrian Williams, 16, was killed in Easton. 

In response, a wide-ranging review as launched by the Keeping Bristol Safe Partnership, which includes the police and city council. As part of its research, the partnership gathered and analysed information it held about 10 young people who were involved in three different incidents of serious youth violence.

“The young people were all from communities who were minoritised in different ways, characterised by structural inequalities including racial inequality and bias as well as through poverty and exclusion. They had low levels of school attendance, were children missing education and/or had experienced multiple suspensions, managed moves or exclusions. A number also had undiagnosed or suspected special education needs,” the report read.

Bagley says that young people who have been mistreated by adults and failed by systems they expect to support them, “find it hard to trust” and are harmed as a result. Speaking of those he worked with in secure settings like Vinney Green, he tells the Cable: “Hurt people hurt people, right? These are people who have been harmed before they harm others, generally.”

To stop serious youth violence, we need to understand the root causes of it. The problem is – as campaigners, youth workers and teachers who supported my research for this story have repeatedly told me – “we’ve understood it for a long time”.

“ Knife crime is not our issue,” says Maya Mate-Kole, youth justice specialist and founder of the Mwanzo Project, a Black-led community interest company that supports children and young people who are at risk or already involved in offending or exploitation in Bristol.

“Serious violence is, and it’s caused by a number of different contributing factors. Our issues are deep-rooted and they are a result of a decade of austerity, lack of safe spaces for young people, failings in systems [of] support for families.”

Back at Vinney Green, a member of staff is leading a storytelling workshop. She introduces the task by asking the group to think about their name: who gave it to them, where it comes from or what it means.

As the others chat and prepare to share their story, one of the children becomes visibly distressed and falls silent. They agree to leave the session and are led out of the room by another member of staff, through a series of locked doors, for one-to-one support.

The reason behind this child’s retreat into silence, the staff member would learn later that day. The child had stabbed a member of their own family – someone who had abused them. Someone who shared the same name. Every mention of it was forcing this child to relive the trauma, to relive the story of their name. 

“If you don’t place [a crime] in context, it’s easy to demonise that young person,” the member of staff tells the Cable. “It’s easy for people to feel safe if it’s one person who is ‘evil’, and that it’s not our collective responsibility to change the things that create those circumstances.”