Schools will play a key role in hosting the government’s new youth hubs as part of a reimagining of New Labour’s Sure Start scheme. Could Oasis’s school community hubs provide the blueprint for Sure Start 2.0?
But rather than focusing on early years support as the former network of children’s centres did, this time the government’s focus is teenagers – with a mandate for hubs to boost community cohesion and keep young people in school.
Labour’s manifesto promised its Young Futures programme would be a “network of hubs reaching every community”, hosting youth workers, mental health support workers and careers advisers to “support young people’s mental health and avoid them being drawn into crime”.
A newly launched Home Office unit to oversee the programme will work with schools, police and charities to design and deliver the hubs.
The department says they will provide safe places for young people to be with friends and mentors, and “channel their time positively and keep them in school”.
An Oasis from adversity
Oasis, the charitable trust whose multi-academy trust Oasis Community Learning runs 54 schools, is at the forefront of this vision.
Oasis also hosts the Centre for Young Lives, chaired by former children’s commissioner Anne Longfield.
It recommended a “Sure Start for teenagers” in 2022, envisaging a “network of intervention and support” for vulnerable young people, with hubs “in and around school”.
It met with Labour’s then-shadow ministers and its proposals are understood to have informed the government’s programme.
Oasis is piloting two youth hubs this autumn on the sites of former private schools in London and the Wirral in Merseyside.
We visited its Lambeth hub, where Oasis has worked for almost two decades, to see how its partnership model between schools, local government and other groups could be rolled out elsewhere.
No ifs, no butts
And one of our first introductions was to Jupiter the goat, who “loves the media” according to Oasis’s chief operating officer Danielle Welch, despite his attempt to headbutt our photographer.
The farm in Waterloo, surrounded by tower blocks, normally also includes geese (who Welch says grew up into “terrible, angry teenagers”) sheep and pigs.
Vulnerable youngsters are sent by schools for six-week wellbeing programmes. Volunteers living on a nearby estate also help care for the animals.
Many of the estate’s families are crammed into temporary accommodation, overlooked by the £3 million penthouse flat actor Kevin Spacey has up for sale.
They can feel alienated from the wealth around them, but working at the farm provides a sense of purpose and community, explains Welch.
At a nearby community centre, Oasis offers free meals and play sessions twice a week, and hosts community festivals, a local authority library, foodbank, a debt and immigration advice centre and adult learning programmes.
Its six youth workers support pupils at the adjoining Oasis Academy South Bank school, one of the country’s best performing secondaries, and the nearby Oasis Academy Johanna, where children make almost two years of additional progress in reading, writing and maths.
By the time the school day ends there’s little left in the centre’s food bank fridges. The hub quickly fills up with chattering teenagers who are served squash and biscuits. Many stay into the evening to chat and do homework.
Youth worker Sonia advocates for families to access financial support and better housing – overcrowding is a big issue.
“They’re often offered transfers to new homes many miles away,” she says. “Families benefiting from our wraparound services don’t want to lose that support by moving.”
One local resident, Maria Lopez, says during the pandemic some individuals were “causing major disturbances”, leading some people on the estate to “fear leaving their homes”. She and some other parents asked Oasis for support when schools reopened in safely getting their kids to school. The next day, Oasis staff escorted them and “even helped handle a concerning situation”. Lopez believes that without Oasis, their community “would be at a greater risk”.
Oasis also partners with a law firm whose lawyers mentor struggling South Bank pupils. Youth mentors working for Oasis also support victims of gang violence at St Thomas’s A&E department – echoing the government’s plans to put youth workers in hospitals.
Pillar of the community
The Waterloo farm began a decade ago after Oasis’s charismatic founder, Baptist minister Steve Chalke, realised Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS trust had acres of derelict land and asked to borrow it.
The partnership work Oasis has established here is “one of the firmest examples of what a school, hub and community working together can do,” says Welch.
The charity, which is funded by a mix of government contracts, charitable donations and local authority grants, has 22 local hub charities linked to schools.
Ideally they’d all have access to farms like the one in Waterloo, but that is dependent on availability of facilities.
The Waterloo farm is closing soon as the land is earmarked for development, and Jupiter will likely move home to Oasis’s new youth hub at St Martin’s Village in South London.
Once there he will likely be part of the therapeutic support available to vulnerable young people at risk of school exclusion.
Oasis also recently opened a secure school (an alternative to young-offender institutions) in Rochester, Kent, called Oasis Restore, with therapy at its heart. Two more Oasis-led youth hubs are planned at school bases in Enfield, North London, and Salford, Gtr Manchester.
Giving local leadership
In Salford, the community hub at Oasis Media City UK school – which has almost three times the national average of pupil-premium kids –provided almost 18,000 meals in the last academic year to the local community. Headteacher Paul McEvoy believes this helped boost school attendance.
Although many heads believe schools should not be overburdened by a pressure to act as a fourth emergency service, McEvoy is a “firm believer” that community leadership is a “really important part of a principal’s role”.
He sees it as a “two-way street” and says: “Happier communities benefit the school. If all the services work together, that’s going to better improve the circumstances that communities are in.”
One of his year 8 pupils lost his mum last year and is being cared for by his nan, who now attends weekly Zumba sessions at the hub.
“Getting her across the threshold into our building helps us forge those relationships, to know what’s going on at home a little more and to help with uniform, clothes and food, whatever it might be,” McEvoy says.
There’s also a ‘talk café’ for those who speak little English, a playgroup for parents and babies that is supported by pupils, and a Friday night youth club.
McEvoy believes getting the community into the school helps them to feel ownership of it, which he says results in fewer parental complaints.
More than 100 families attended the hub’s community Iftars and Christmas fêtes last academic year.
He says: “The school is a neutral space for people to come together, respecting one another’s differences. Building relationships is a key part of our work, in what can sometimes be in our country’s quite segregated and fractured communities.”
Mental health support
There are long waiting lists for mental health support services for children in Salford, McEvoy says, but the hub’s youth mentor can support pupils in the meantime.
Back in 2014, Oasis Academy Foundry in Birmingham had just been taken over by Oasis and was in special measures when Channel Four documentary Benefits Street started filming in its neighbourhood. Oasis advocated on the community’s behalf to try and dispel negative stereotypes.
“It’s not just working with families; we fight for our communities to create equity in society,” says Oasis MAT’s CEO John Barneby.
He believes the reason the Birmingham school is now rated ‘outstanding’ is due to the community hub Oasis launched there, which offers cooking sessions and a food pantry.
Moving in on vacant spaces
While falling rolls are causing headaches for many educators, for Oasis, redundant school sites are creating new opportunities.
Oasis St Martin’s Village stands on the site of one of the UK’s first girls’ schools – St Martin-in-the-Fields high school for girls in Tulse Hill, founded in 1699, closed last year due to falling rolls.
Similarly, Oasis partnered with the Kingsmead Trust to open a therapeutic centre for children at risk of exclusion on the site of the private Kingsmead School on the Wirral, which shut in 2020.
“In inner-city areas, if that building doesn’t get put to use it’ll become a hotel – so why not put it to community use instead?” says Welch.
The vision for Oasis St Martin’s Village is “of bringing all the services together in one place for young people and building around it”, she says.
Working with partners, Oasis will develop sport, music, agriculture, dance and art activities, all free for young people and their families. The concept is based around making education “a pleasure”, says Chalke.
“If a child can’t learn the way we teach, we must start teaching the way they learn.”
Sure Start legacy
Oasis would like to see the government’s youth hubs offer expanded to include much wider family support, mirroring what Oasis already provides in its community hubs.
The Centre for Young Lives wants ministers to allocate £1 billion from the levelling-up fund to expand youth hubs and family hubs to all disadvantaged areas by 2029.
This, it says, would leave a lasting legacy that’s truly on the scale of Sure Start. But that vision is limited by government funding constraints.
Starved by austerity
Policies rarely leave a positive imprint in the public imagination in the way Sure Start did. The networks launched in 1998 were found to have led to a significant net decrease in hospital admissions for children and higher GCSE grades; for every £1 spent, educational outcome benefits were worth £1.09, the Institute for Fiscal Studies calculated.
Centres were subsequently starved of cash. More than one-third (38 per cent) of the 3,106 council-run centres open in 2010-11 had shut by 2022-23, Unison reported.
Sure Start’s meagre successor, the Family Hubs programme launched by the last government which focused on early years support, was earmarked for just £300 million funding for three years to 2025 in 75 local authority areas.
Similarly, youth hubs will get less than 4 per cent of the £2.5 billion funding (in today’s prices) that Sure Start received at its peak.
The 92 planned hubs will receive £91.7 million a year – intended to be funded by the predicted revenue from introducing VAT on private school fees.
Welch believes Oasis’s model is more cost-effective than the one used by local authorities because they rely on volunteers. But she says it takes two to five years to really make a difference and build a solid cohort of supporters.
Barneby believes Oasis’s community support model could be rolled out by other MATs and schools using their convening powers.
As local authority funding has been reduced, schools have become “the only bit of social infrastructure that’s still got that long-term relationship with families”, he says.
“Just 25 per cent of a child’s life is in school and it’s impossible, with a conscience, to ignore the challenges in society.”
He points out many Sure Start centres were started by schools. “The integrated place-based approach creates places where people can belong. “We probably need to go back to that model where a bit of funding can deliver an awful lot locally.”
