Knife Crime: Can Education Save Lives? (Steve Chalke)

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0:43BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. This is Radical with Amol Rajan. Conversations about tomorrow from today, where I explore the global trends, changing the world, and go in search of the radical ideas that might help you win the future. And he said, Steve, would you be my dad? And that is a tragedy. This is what I realised, Amal, and this changed my life. And it's informed everything since. All of that needs to happen. And that is radical. In this episode, a conversation with Steve Chalk, the founder of the Oasis Charitable Trust, which runs a chain of academies and the UK's first secure school, which I recently visited for the Today programme.

1:34It's in Kent, quite close to Rochester. And I went there to talk to some boys who had done just about the worst things that people can do. They'd killed people. And what I found there was a pretty radical approach to young offenders, which involved therapeutic healing rather than punishment. I found very, very common themes to do with neurodiversity and absent dads and the old chestnut of poverty, which made you think that some of these children never stood a chance. But of course, they are criminals. And there are lots of people who believe that the place for criminals and violent criminals at that is behind bars.

2:10so when Steve Chalk came into the Radical Studio we talked about how any civilised society should deal with and treat violent young criminals we talked about why so many people are growing up without fathers and the consequences of that which may well be taboo for some people but certainly not on this podcast and we talked about how we should reform and rethink and reimagine teaching so that it benefits everyone going through our education system

2:48Yeah, I've got to talk to you for hours. Listen, Steve, how are you? I'm doing well and excited to be here. You grew up not very far from where I grew up in South London. You're a Croydon boy. But you're what? I don't know if you still use the term, but what was then known derogatory in a derogatory way as half-caste, but now we call mixed race because your father was from South India. Dual ethnicity. Dual ethnicity. So we've got all of those things. So we've gone from half-caste to mixed-race to dual-ethnicity. It's a great journey. Which is a great journey. And it's been your journey. And your father was an Anglo-Indian with extremely dark skin.

3:19From Madras, Chennai now. Chennai, which is where my father was from. Tell me about your dad. So my father was Anglo-Indian. And that's hard for people to understand sometimes, isn't it? Because we use the term Anglo-Indian in our culture to mean what I am, half Indian, half English, whereas Anglo-Indians are a race, as you'll know. My dad was quite a fair Tamilian, but a lot of people from Tamil Nadu have really quite dark skin. And crudely, in Croydon, in the late 50s and 60s, I mean, is that roughly the time of no Irish, no blacks, no dogs and all of that horrific stuff? No, it was quite a thing to be part of a dual ethnicity household.

4:07Yeah, it was. So he came over here. You know, it was that there was the equivalent of the Windrush, wasn't there? Yes. And lots of particularly Anglo-Indians after the petition of India came to the UK to help out rebuild the motherland, the mother country after the Second World War. And my dad was one of them. And I always say because I experienced it. I'm the first of four kids. I was born in 1955, 10 years after the end of the war. And I experienced for myself, reflecting on it now, that the invitation was a lot greater than the welcome. So when he got here, it was tough. It was really tough.

4:48And your dad was a clever man and an educated man. Those two things don't always go together, but in his case it did. And whereas for some of his, even his family, I think his younger brother came after about 18 years later, came up to a kind of middle-class professional job. Your dad worked in a canteen and then worked on the railways. Was it South Norwood Station? Yeah, South Norwood Station. He became the ticket collector. And so he couldn't get a job because of the colour of his skin. My uncle, when he came, Uncle Bobby, he came to live with us with his six kids, all crammed into our house.

5:21It's strangely a very Indian name, Bobby, for some reason. Yeah. And what about your mum? She was English. She was English. So my uncle, yeah, he got a job as a head of maths in a Croydon school. But my dad, with the same qualifications, just, you know, time had passed. He couldn't get a job. So he got a job working in a canteen for what was London Transport, which is where he met my mum, who comes from Chatham. And my mum was, but she died recently, but so fair skinned. If she went out in the sun, she'd go blotchy red. Being a mixed race couple was an unusual thing. It was really tough. And some of her family disapproved and wouldn't come to the house or would come when my dad wasn't there.

6:04But the thing is, I remember walking up the street with him. Sometimes he'd come and get me from a primary school. And people would literally, I could see them cross the road, cross the street, rather than walk past him. And I don't think, reflecting back on it, that that was all to do with a hatred of what they saw as a black man. Perhaps some of it was. But I think a lot of it was embarrassment. You know, like, I can't speak Indian. You know, what am I going to say? And all this kind of thing. People still ask me about Indian. Do I speak Indian? Yes, exactly. As if Indian itself is a language.

6:41So there's that ignorance, yeah, around all of this. And I think that people shied away because of that as well. And did your mum work? no my mom my mom didn't work my mom and dad uh my mom left school without any real education um a lot of that post-war generation women were very frustrated weren't they because they had such brains she was my parents were fantastic honestly i think back on it now what they gave and then my dad got this job on the on the station and he did it till the day he retired and he knew and i knew that he could do so much more but he he'd never complain never ever complain I've got a brother and two sisters.

7:18He never complained. And he did that shift work, you know, up through the nights. And these were the days, you know, of Crystal Palace, you know, that Millwall and football riots and, you know, skinheads and all those. And I used to lay awake sometimes, so worrying for him. If there was an evening match, like, he'd get beaten up by the gangs on the station. It's pretty riotous even now. But he did that, and he did it without complaining, and he provided for us. It's so interesting because one of the things we're going to talk about when we talk about the very urgent, really moral and spiritual, you might say, crises facing a lot of the people you work with now is poverty, which is often a common denominator.

8:00And I think you'd say you were poor growing up, but you lived in a caring family and you had some social protections. You had a wonderful family network, but you were poor. There is an interesting thing, I guess, about poverty, which is, and I certainly don't want to over claim my credentials in that way in any way, shape or form. But when it's all you know, you don't wander around thinking, oh, I'm poor. No, you don't. You wander around thinking, this is what normality is. And I mean, we're going to come on to it later, but some of the kids that you work with, some of whom have done very terrible things and have seen terrible things, it's all they've ever known.

8:35It's relative poverty that gets you, isn't it? it's when you when you know there are people up the street with all of this stuff that you see advertised on tv and on your social media and when you walk into the shop and when it feels near to you and yet so far you've got nothing there's just a couple of other threads from your childhood i just want to put out there for people because it really explains how you've come to the work that's defined your life i think for 40 odd years one of the bits of work together with your work in the service of God. And it also, I think, helps explain some of your more radical ideas.

9:11One was what happened on day one at school, because you didn't get through the 11 plus. No, I went to something called Davidson Secondary Modern School. And on day one, in the first assembly, as I remember it, we were told that we weren't the kind of kids that would do well from taking O-levels as they were then, GCSEs as they are now. We were the kind of children that would work with our hands and our heads through life, and that we were going to get an education to prepare us for that, not for anything else. So, and that was, it was spoken over all of us. You know, it becomes this thing that you believe because you're told it from the start.

9:47And so I went through my secondary school education with no sense that, well, I never had a career, no one, I'm not picking on me, I'm not saying, we never had a career lesson. Second little thread out there is a rejection. And we've all been there, haven't we, Steve? but a rejection you got from a girl. 15 she was, you were 14. And this became a bit of a defining moment. And her name was Mary Hooper. Mary Hooper. You still in touch with Mary Hooper? I still am. So you asked her out on a date and you're a handsome bloke, Steve. I'm sure it's a 14-year-old man. But you made your advances in a gentle way and she rejected you.

10:20Well, the thing is she passed the 11 plus. And the only way I could see her was to go to the local youth club at the local Baptist church, which actually is at one end of the Crystal Palace football grounds. And so every Friday night, they had this little youth club, you know, is at Old Hall and the girls all stood in one corner and the boys all stand in the other corner because they were all too shy to talk to one another. And they played ping pong and they served Coca-Cola and that kind of stuff. And at the end, one of these very old guys who were the youth leaders would stand up and do a little epilogue, a little five-minute talk for you.

10:55And off you go home. Well, one particular week, she got her best friend or one of her best friends to come over to talk to one of my best friends to tell me that she thought I was ugly and she would never go out with me. Yeah, I mean, last thing on earth, you know. 14 year olds can be brutal, as you know. And anyway, so I had this bad news. And that night I wandered home. And as I wandered up this road, I thought, oh, no, my life's at an end. you know no mary no life you know all this kind of and then this extraordinary thought struck me and i would say epiphany yeah an epiphany and an awakening it came from outside of me that's the point it wasn't my thought it came from outside of me and and i suddenly thought hang on a minute you know because i was thinking i'm never going back because it's embarrassing because of mary and i suddenly thought i suddenly realized that the story they told me at that church youth group was so much better than the story they told me at my school.

11:56Because my school told me we were all a waste of space, drifting through history to their deaths, you know, kind of thing. Whereas here, they told me that I was made by God and my life had meaning and purpose. Even if I'd ever fulfilled it, it was there, it was waiting. They saved you and in a way they told you you could be someone. Well, wandering up that street on the way home, it wasn't just that I decided to go back to the youth club, even if Mary Hooper didn't fancy me, it was that this story was revolutionary, that my life had some meaning and purpose, which I linked to the message at the church.

12:30And when I say these old guys who taught me, I later, when I went back the next week, slowly discovered they weren't old at all. They were all 21 and 22, you know, that kind of thing. But I went back to see them because on the way home, I felt that if my life mattered and it had purpose, what was the purpose? The purpose must be to communicate to other people that their lives mattered and that they were unique. They had potential. And particularly because I went to this dump of a school, I knew kids who were looked after, as we call now. They were fostered. You know, they were shunted from pillar to post.

13:06And I knew it was kind of discombobulating to them. I knew that I was loved. I knew honestly, I knew that I was loved. My mum and dad weren't the kind of people who ever told me that. I don't think either of them ever said, I love you. Not that I remember. But there isn't a day of my life that I didn't know it. It's a strange thing. Love is a word we often don't use when we talk about crime, when we talk about re-offending rates, when we talk about prison and incarceration. We talk about young killers in some cases. But love is a very big part of what you do. Just to illustrate what you do, just go to the extreme edge of it.

13:41Oasis, which you set up, how long ago now? So it was 40 years ago it started. You see, and it's all related to that walk home because I decided that when I grew up, therefore, I was going to set up a house for kids to live in where who'd never been loved and never been careful because some of my mates were like that. I was going to set up a school that was worth going to. And strangely, I was going to set up a hospital and I was going to be a church leader because they seem to have a better idea of things. So that's why I went back to the church, told them all this. These guys said, oh, you better do theology when you grow up.

14:14I didn't know what theology was. I hardly knew what biology was. But eventually I left school at 18. I went and worked in a factory for two years in Ashford in Kent. And I set up a youth group on something called the Stanhope estate. They still say Stanhope, no hope. But this burnt in me to set up a house, set up a school, set up a hospital. so over the years starting with housing and taking in kids supported housing for kids who who are in trouble no one loved them no one cared for them i slowly learned the hard way lessons about working with jordan the first project we set up is in peckham housing project and that's where oasis got its name because my wife cornelia said we're going to create an oasis for these kids when they first started arriving i was expecting them all to say steve thanks wonderful you couldn't make eye contact with them they looked down you know they wouldn't shake your hand they wouldn't smile no please no thank you and then they started stealing things like they'd steal the kettles out the room and then complain that they weren't there i'd bought this huge telly a bit like this one here but not you know big chunky one back then and somebody stole that these kids were stealing their own stuff and then complaining and i was so mad with them and then i realized this this is what i realized amel and this changed my life and it's informed everything since i realized that if these kids i was so frustrated with them but i realized slowly if they were missing a limb if they'd have broken arm if they couldn't walk if they were in a wheelchair i'd have compensated I'd have opened doors for them.

15:55I'd have understood their disability. But the only way I could say it then, it's before neuroscience really, is I worked out that their wounds were somehow in their heads. And it took me ages to realise that. But I did. And I realised that the problem was mine, not theirs, because they lack love. And I suppose that's what launched our schools, at housing programmes around this country and other countries and eventually Oasis Restore. It's the same thing. Love is the ingredient without which we cannot thrive. And if it isn't working, just up the dose. Some of the people that you work with have done some of the worst crimes imaginable.

16:39Terrible things. In fact, let's go further than that. A lot of young children that you have mentored and been a father figure to for many decades have done double murders. Terrible, terrible things. And there are some people who say, Well, you might think that the answer is love. I don't know if one of your radical ideas is you think we shouldn't be criminalizing them. But some people say, A, of course you should be criminalizing them because we need laws and they've transgressed those laws and that makes them criminals. And secondly, there might be 13, there might still be children, but if they're willing to shank, in other words, stab someone to death, they're dangerous and they need to be off the streets.

17:19Yes. They are criminal, Steve. What would you say to that? Well, there's two things I would say. Firstly, accepting that they're criminals, they've been involved in criminal behaviour, absolutely. Nothing of what I am trying to do is to negate that, is to understand that their behaviour has been destructive. I get that. But it's to try to understand why this happens and what goes on. The second thing I would say is that we've been tough on crime and we've been tougher on crime and we've been tougher still on crime and we've been extra tough on crime. And we have our prisons full to overflowing like no other country in Europe.

18:03And we spend huge amounts on our justice system. And most of it is spent on re-offending and re-convictions. What's your radical idea to reduce re-offending? Well, I firstly say what we're doing now isn't working. that because you report on Radio 4, it can't be weeks or days probably before you'll be sitting there with someone saying the whole prison system is going to collapse in the next year or two, unless we start releasing people earlier and earlier and earlier and trying to build prisons, but we haven't got time to do it. So what is the beginning point, Admiral, is to say what we are doing now does not work and cost the taxpayer an absolute fortune.

18:43And by the way, doesn't make our streets safer because almost everyone goes huge numbers i should say of people go on to re-offend especially young people but isn't what we should try a different way but isn't what you do also very expensive just for people to understand you've got a chain of centers oasis restore which i visited and it was an extraordinary experience and i spoke to three young people who you told me afterwards were in there for the worst possible crimes in other words murder, in one case double murder, is one of your centres. You also do a lot of preventive work. Yes. And I know you would make the case that prevention is both morally better because you avoid the crime.

19:24And much cheaper. We'll get on to that. But in terms of the re-offending specifically, it is extraordinary the rate of re-offending from young people, a very, very high number of people who leave youth justice. 83 % re-offend within 12 months. So what does the evidence of your career suggest is a way to get that number down? Well, I think that if, and I think you discovered this when you came to Restore, the kids that you spoke to all told you that they'd not been loved, that they'd not known their fathers, that they had no guiding star, that their mums had tried, but their dads had let them down.

20:05I can tell you this, that although each story is different of each young person we work with, either in Restore or in other settings and situations, sometimes in the mainstream schools that we run, we run 54 mainstream schools around the country. What you find time after time after time is that antisocial behaviour is an outworking of anxiety, fear and anger within you and not feeling that you count, that you matter. it comes from inside and I've discovered over the years over the 40 years that I've now been responsible for Oasis well part of Oasis much more than me now is that love changes everything but I don't mean soppiness real love you're a dad you've got children you know love is about boundaries you want to be involved with your children don't you intimately involved all of the time they matter to you but you also know that setting boundaries for them really matters because that's part of love.

21:10It's not different to love. Well, let's talk about dads. But just before we do that, I just want to give people watching and listening to this a couple of numbers. So on the figures about young offenders, an increasing proportion of children aged between 10 and 14 years old are suspected of committing violent crime in London. According to the Met Police, 7 ,512 children aged between 10 and 14 were suspected of violent crime, including knife offences in 2023. That's a rise of 38 % from 2020. There was a big dip with the pandemic, but it's once again on the increase. Knife crime is on the increase.

21:46What have you found is driving the renewed increase in knife crime and violent crime committed by young people? Any teacher sat here, primary teacher, secondary teacher, will all tell you that since COVID, we have more and more children turning up in school without language skills. Some children turning up who can't walk, who can't concentrate, who can't coordinate. It's an extraordinary thing. Children turning up who aren't potty trained, who still wear nappies. That never happened before. But in terms of their emotional and social intelligence, we don't know, do we? Those key years in a young child's life where they don't get socialised and their brain develops differently as a result.

22:38We know all of this. We are seeing the impacts of a lot of that. I'm not trying to make excuses. There's no excuse for criminal behaviour, but we do need to understand it if we're going to move forward. Listen, Steve, no one looking at your career over 40 years would suggest that anything you've done is about making excuses. I think you're about trying to find solutions. Yeah. Could I say something else, though? Because it's something that you picked up that we've not talked about. We in the UK criminalise young people at the age of 10. That is the lowest in all of Europe. Why is it wrong? Well, the United Nations, I was an advisor to the UN for eight years, the United Nations Rights of a Child says that no nation should criminalise a young person before the age of 14.

23:23They say that's the minimum. It's got to be that. It's got to be that or higher. Now, here's the thing. Why don't we allow a 14-year-old or a 13-year-old, why don't we allow a 13-year-old to drive a car? Why don't we allow a 13-year-old to get married? Why don't we allow them to vote? Why don't we allow them to drink in a pub? Why, why, why, why? Because we know that their brains aren't developed enough to make good judgments through your teenage years. Your rash, your prefrontal cortex isn't fully developed, your judgment center. So we don't allow children to do that. But we choose to criminalise a child at the age of 10.

24:02So here's the problem. A 13-year-old commits a crime and our tabloid press says, you know, drugs, for instance, our tabloid press says, 13-year-old thug arrested by police for drug running. Lock them up. But in Portugal, trust me, that headline would read, 13-year-old child rescued by police from drug gang. what can we do better to protect our children so the age of criminality standing at 10 no other european country like us changes the whole dynamic and context of every conversations so if we change the age if we change the age of criminality in that threshold that would change the way we frame these young people yeah yeah look at them more as children than as people who are basically criminals and thugs.

24:54Absolutely. They're children with developing brains. And if we just follow the science, you see, my opinion doesn't matter. We need to follow the science. But your experience is very useful. And it's that experience I want to lean on. I want to ask you about three social crises. One is school absences. The number of severely absent pupils in the UK has soared by 187 % since before the pandemic. Persistent absence in this country has increased by 78.29 % since before the pandemic. And 1.64 million pupils were persistently absent in the summer term of 2024. That's 23 % of all pupils. That's astonishing.

25:39Let's talk about a problem and then a solution. Why is that happening, do you think? I think it's happening for a number of reasons. but to sum it up in a phrase what goes first in education is your engagement you're not excited anymore your education isn't magnetic what goes next is your attainment because once you're not engaged your attainment's going to fall through the floor and then you're going to feel like the kid that doesn't matter who doesn't get it etc you're likely to end up with detentions etc for messing around so what goes after your attainment and your attention is your attendance and it becomes well i go sometimes so their persistent absence the phrase you used is it officially it's a child that's missing for more than 10 of the time in other words school has become optional and actually it becomes i know it becomes optional to some children because it was optional to their parents now would you go on a training course for 14 years which is what education is from the age of 4 to 18 would you go on a training course for 14 years only to be told every week that you're thick that you don't get it stand in line stay after school you were late stay for detention and at the end of your 14 years of training you just get told you're worth nothing and So we've got to change that.

27:10We'll talk about how we change it. That's the experience of some kids who I've worked with and you've worked with in great detail for many years who are at the lower levels of attainment. That's not the experience of a great schooling. I mean, a great schooling is a wonderful, wonderful experience. It's a wonderful experience for about a third of the kids, Amal. Roughly speaking, because the stats go up and down a bit each year, but roughly speaking, a third of children love school because the chosen medium for learning is reading and writing. And they love reading and writing. About a second third of children don't love it, but they can get by.

27:50You know, they can put in the work and do enough to get through it, but they're really glad when it's over. And a third struggle. Really struggle and a dropping out. I know that you've got some, to coin a phrase, pretty radical ideas about changing education. One of those is to do with recognizing neurodiversity, which you think is underdiagnosed and underacknowledged. Another is to do with stage, not age. But a third one is I know that one of the concerns that you've got is that the model of education we have in this country prizes one form of human aptitude more than any other. In other words, cognitive ability, reading and writing.

28:26Why do you think it's wrong? What we're doing at the moment needs to be radically rethought. Yeah. Well, I think you said earlier that 25 percent of children in the country are what we call neurodiverse. And the little illustration I always use is when we talk about biodiversity, which we do very often, we are all very anxious that we keep every inch of biodiversity we possibly can, because we know that the air we breathe, the food we eat and the water we drink is dependent on biodiversity. and we've got to work a lot harder than we have been to preserve life on Earth through biodiversity. When we come on to talk about neurodiversity, the endless amounts of people still see it as a bit of a problem, you know?