Knife Crime: Can Education Save Lives? (Steve Chalke)
Radical with Amol Rajan
BBC
4.5 • 919 Ratings
🗓️ 26 June 2025
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
More children are being convicted of crime and our prisons are nearly at capacity. But Steve Chalke thinks he has a solution.
The founder of the Oasis Charitable Trust, which runs a chain of academies and the UK’s first secure school, works closely with children who have committed the worst crimes. He advocates for radically changing our schools, the education system, and how we rehabilitate our young offenders.
Amol and Steve also talk about their shared background, the crisis of masculinity, and how a rejection at the age of 14 lead him to where he is today.
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Amol Rajan is a presenter of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. He is also the host of University Challenge on BBC One. Before that, Amol was media editor at the BBC and editor at The Independent.
Radical with Amol Rajan is a Today Podcast. It was made by Lewis Vickers with Izzy Rowley. Digital production was by Gabriel Purcell-Davis. The editor is Sam Bonham. The executive producer is Owenna Griffiths.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.0 | This is Radical with Amol Rajan. |
| 0:07.9 | Conversations about tomorrow from today, where I explore the global trends, |
| 0:12.7 | changing the world, and go in search of the radical ideas that might help you win the future. |
| 0:18.9 | And he said, Steve, would you be my dad? |
| 0:24.9 | And that is a tragedy. |
| 0:29.7 | This is what I realised, Amel, and this changed my life. |
| 0:32.7 | And it's informed everything since. |
| 0:35.5 | All of that needs to happen and that is radical. |
| 0:38.0 | In this episode, a conversation with Steve Chalk, the founder of the Oasis Charitable |
| 0:44.2 | Trust, which runs a chain of academies and the UK's first secure school, which I recently |
| 0:50.5 | visited for the Today program. |
| 0:52.3 | It's in Kent, quite close to Rochester. |
| 0:54.6 | And I went there to talk to some boys who had done just about the worst things that people |
| 1:00.1 | can do. |
| 1:00.6 | They'd killed people. |
| 1:01.7 | And what I found there was a pretty radical approach to young offenders, which involved |
| 1:07.6 | therapeutic healing rather than punishment. |
| 1:10.5 | I found very, very common themes to do with neurodiversity and absent dads |
| 1:14.9 | and the old chestnut of poverty, which made you think that some of these children |
| 1:19.9 | never stood a chance. |
| 1:21.1 | But of course, they are criminals, and there are lots of people who believe that the place |
... |
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