Oasis Restore, the first of its kind for young offenders, hopes to reopen near Rochester next March, so long as it can beef up security in time.
Justice Minister Jake Richards has acknowledged his department chose the wrong doors when converting the former Medway Secure Training Centre into what was intended to be a pioneering new approach to youth custody.
Correcting that error and fitting 184 suitably robust new internal doors is expected to cost anywhere between £3mn to £6mn – though some of that money will come from savings, due to the school being shut.
So, what happened originally at Oasis Restore? Why did it initially fail?
No more mistakes – Oasis at the public accounts committee
When the Ministry of Justice’s top civil servant, Dr Jo Farrar, appeared before the public accounts committee to discuss the problems at Oasis Restore, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, Tory chair of the Public Accounts Committee, demanded to know why it had taken so long to replace the low-security old doors.
He reminded the Ministry of Justice’s Permanent Secretary: “The procurement team promised that stronger doors would be installed by the middle of May, then it was June, and then July. They never materialised, and I gather they have still not materialised. When is this problem likely to be resolved?”
Good questions. But for once, the civil service had clear answers.
“We hope to reopen the secure school in March of next year, because it is important to us,” Dr Farrar replied.
He added: “It is also critical that we get this right. We are making sure that we do thorough testing of all new doors, and we are obviously having to create a new door system.
“We will start to introduce the new doors into the site shortly, and we hope to reopen in March next year.”
Hope springs eternal.
Lock-Breaking in Oasis Restore
Oasis Restore opened in August 2024, promising a fresh approach to youth custody, one which focused on rehabilitation through education and therapeutic care, rather than punishment and retribution. It was widely welcomed as a groundbreaking facility.
Inside the school, however, it was not long before the lads, aged between 12 and 19, developed lock-breaking techniques by simply body-barging through the doors. This seriously compromised the secure school’s security
Just six months after opening, staff at the secure school – which cost more than £40mn to refurbish – were raising the alarm. Their concerns were spelt out by the minister in a letter to the chair of the Justice Select Committee, Labour MP Andy Slaughter, who had sent a string of questions to the ministry.
Mr Richards explained: “Oasis Restore raised concerns about internal door functionality in February 2025, when several incidents of vandalism exposed weaknesses in the locking systems and door fabric of some doors.”
This, he added, “hindered staff from effectively fulfilling their roles, and the concerns have resulted in increased risk to the safety of children and staff.”
Those risks centred on the grim reality that Oasis Restore handles some of the most complex and dangerous young people in England. According to Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: “Some of the people involved – by no means all – including murderers, rapists, drug dealers and gang members.”
Signs of serious problems at the school began to emerge early in 2025. Ofsted was soon making repeated attempts to pin down what was going wrong in Rochester, sending in a string of inspection teams; first in February, then April, again in June.
One of the inspection reports described doors so damaged that they could not lock, while the students could move around freely in some areas.
Chillingly, the report added: “There has been an increase in instances of children making weapons out of everyday items. Some children say that this is because they have not always felt safe recently.” Those weapons were shards of wood taken from broken doors, but were later handed into the staff.
Berserk attack on three female staff members
For a while, there were hopes the new, more robust doors would arrive by May; they didn’t. Nor in June. In July, Oasis discovered the Ministry of Justice had not yet even ordered the new doors.
Then, in mid-August, the police were summoned to the school following reports of a 17-year-old inmate going berserk, attacking three female members of staff. That just about put the tin lid on it.
Less than a year after opening, the inevitable decision was reached to temporarily close Oasis Restore, dispersing the young offenders hither and thither to more traditional centres.
All of this was a heartbreaking blow, not only to the Oasis charity, which runs the school, but to a swath of organisations and individuals who had looked to the Rochester pilot scheme as a template for the future. Not least the Rev Steve Chalke, who founded the Oasis charity in 1985, and who saw last summer’s closure as “a tragedy.”
The radical idea of creating secure schools came among the top recommendations of the 2016 Taylor Review of the Youth Justice System. That report wanted to see education become central to helping rehabilitate children in custody.
Initially, the Ministry of Justice intended to launch two secure schools, one on the Medway, the other on Merseyside. Currently, however, Oasis Restore is the only one on the books, and now the fear is that is how it will stay.
The problems being experienced in Kent caught more than just local attention. By this autumn, questions were being asked in both the Commons and the Lords about what was happening at the school.
Easington’s Labour MP Grahame Morris wanted to know how many assaults by young offenders at the school had been reported to the police. Justice Minister Mr Richards said that from the school’s opening up to 31 March this year, there had been 31 assaults on staff plus 10 child-on-child assaults.
But, the minister added: “The total number reported to the police was five or fewer: it is not possible to provide an exact figure, as that would risk identifying individuals.”
Soaring cost of Kent secure school questioned in Parliament
In addition to that, the minister revealed that by 28 August this year, a total of 32 weapons had been found. Quite a haul.
Meanwhile, Tory peer Lord Bates was astonished by the rocketing costs of refurbishing the Medway centre. During a debate on the catchily entitled Secure 16 to 19 Academies Bill, he pointed out that the National Audit Office had noted how in 2016 the cost of turning the old Medway Secure Training Centre into the new Oasis Restore secure academy was estimated at £4.9mn. But by 2022, it had risen to £36.5mn.
Lord Bates, who quit politics for a while to obtain a master’s degree in Business Administration from Oxford University, is no slouch when it comes to maths, pointed out: “That is 74.5 per cent over budget!
He added: “I do not know if £36.5mn was the final figure, but given that this was a new facility designed for around 40 people, the capital cost per person was close to £1mn”.
It was not the final figure. By last summer, the figure had reached £40mn, and rising. The Ministry of Justice is paying £1mn a month to retain staff, facilities, plus essential services to ensure the school can eventually reopen smoothly. Then there’s the cost of the doors.
What worries Lord Bates, and almost certainly other supporters of the secure school policy, is that the problems encountered in Kent will deter governments from going ahead with similar schools elsewhere in the country.
The doors at Oasis Restore
Nearly every pioneering project suffers from teething problems and, inevitably, something as contentious as a secure school trying to manage several dozen of the toughest kids in the country may suffer more than most. But the overriding problem at Oasis Restore was the poor choice of security doors.
Those original doors were designed to support “free-flow movement” and, according to the Justice Minister, “promote more of a home/school-like environment.” Hmmm, that didn’t go so well.
Mr Richards insisted the original doors had been properly installed and in line with the agreed specification. The real problem, he confessed, was that “the specification itself has since proven to be unsuitable for the operational demands of a secure setting.”
Which is why the Ministry of Justice has brought in specialist architects to sort out the replacement options. Mr Richards assured the PAC that the new security doors were already being successfully used in other secure settings.
So, who pays? Well, liability for the additional costs sits firmly in Whitehall, and specifically the Ministry of Justice. That’s because “the issue stems from the original design specification rather than a failure of the (Oasis) Trust to maintain the site” the minister explained.
If the Ministry of Justice’s “hopes” of installing the new, stronger, more robust doors by March prove correct, no one will be happier than Steve Chalke, who told Kent and Surrey Bylines: “We will open the day after we have enough safe doors fitted to do so.”
Mr Chalke has been waiting for months to discover when that day will be, not knowing for sure quite what is happening. “But what I do know is that the doors broke because they were not security doors, they were not the right doors,” he stressed.
“If you are running a secure establishment, you are dependent upon the doors being secure, so as to maintain a sense of security. Once the doors break, well, you lose all sense of containment, and the doors did break – because they were not fit for purpose.”
All to do now is watch this space, and ‘hope’ that Oasis manages to get its second chance by March. This time, done properly and more securely, with the support they should have had the first time around.
