'I thought Paul was a success story': Paul is dead. Aycliffe, Durham, is home to some of Britain's most disturbed children. But can it help them? Ann McFerran reports

TONY McCAFFREY does not remember clearly all the children who have passed through his care. But he has never forgotten Paul. 'He was epileptic and diabetic, devious and violent. I learnt my whole job from that boy.'

Like other children who are sent to Aycliffe, the Durham centre that houses some of Britain's most disturbed children, Paul's background was one of violence and family break-up. He had defeated the efforts of many other care agencies. 'At its simplest level, our job was to make him responsible for his own life,' says Mr McCaffrey, who ran Franklin House at Aycliffe. Paul once attempted to stab this gently spoken master; he also frequently faked diabetic comas.

When Michael Whyte went to Durham in 1977 to make Aycliffe, his acclaimed ITV documentary, the cameras watched Mr McCaffrey struggle with his task. At Franklin House, the basis of corrective behaviour was a system of rewards and punishments. 'Good' behaviour was rewarded with tokens called 'Franklins'; 'bad' behaviour, which was seen as 'attention-seeking', was ignored and later punished by fines of tokens. If a child misbehaved - frequently a temper tantrum, or in Paul's case, not eating his food - the other children were paid tokens to ignore his bad behaviour. Despite many hiccups, Paul's behaviour gradually seemed to improve.

Mr McCaffrey, who developed the token economy system, says: 'I realised you can't see behaviour in a vacuum. It became obvious to me that who gave the token mattered most. A token from me, the boss, really counted. Tokens from a care worker, whom the kids had nicknamed 'Robot', were tossed back at him. It was the relationship that mattered.'

Last winter, when Polly Bideset out to make a film about what had happened to the seven children featured in Mr Whyte's original documentary, Paul was the only one she was unable to trace. He died eight years ago, when he was 22, having failed to take his insulin. His body lay for two months in his council flat. 'Ironically, we thought he was one of our success stories,' Mr McCaffrey said when he learnt of Paul's fate.

What now emerges from the histories of the other six children is a bleak picture of persistent criminality, failure to cope and victimisation. Every one of the men has spent some time in prison. Two are living in Salvation Army hostels. Janice, the only woman interviewed, who endured a home life of horrendous abuse, has spent most of her adult life drugged, in mental institutions. 'I can't relate to anyone,' she says. 'I'd like to have children, but I can't because of what's been done to me.'

The unavoidable conclusion is an indictment of how our society treats its most damaged young people. Incredible as it seems today, Aycliffe in the Seventies overlooked the effects of possible sexual abuse. In retrospect, the token economy seems a totally inadequate response to such disturbed children.

David's violent temper tantrums, for example, appeared to be contained by the token economy. He collected a record 5,000 tokens, and was awarded an expensive racing bike by Aycliffe's boss, Masud Hoghughi. But in the outside world rewards for good behaviour do not exist. Since he left Aycliffe, David has been jailed countless times, usually for violent behaviour. 'We didn't touch what was bothering him,' Mr McCaffrey says. 'We barely scratched the surface.'

Eddie, who frequently had uncontrollable rages in which he destroyed his few precious possessions, now lives a vagrant existence, unable to hold down a job. There is no evidence from the 1992 film that the patterns of damaged behaviour that marred these children's lives has been helped by Aycliffe's treatment: the roots of their disturbance have not been touched and they cannot cope with life outside institutions.

But in what way did Aycliffe fail these children?

'We went in and did the job at Aycliffe to the best of our abilities,' Mr McCaffrey says. 'But suddenly, instead of receiving praise, we were disparaged for what we did. And we discovered that horrible things had been happening, like the Frank Beck case (convicted for 17 charges of sexual and physical abuse at a Leicester children's home), the Kincora boys' home (where three people, including the house father, were convicted of sexual offences) and the pin-downs, which are horrific.

'We didn't even know at Aycliffe how widespread sexual abuse was. Later, when I ran a home in Surrey, children would plead with us not to be sent home at weekends. It didn't cross our minds that they were terrified because they were being abused at home.' Such ignorance must have made it more difficult for the staff to comprehend the extent of the damage. The last lingering hopes about the benefits of residential care for children were knocked out of Mr McCaffrey when, in his last job, he was attacked by a boy while alone on duty, and savagely kicked in the head. After recovering from his injuries, he changed his methods.

Mr McCaffrey had entered Aycliffe as a frustrated anthropology student. 'I was meant to be studying people, but I found myself sitting in the library for 10 hours a day,' he says. He retrained as a social worker and today divides his time between London's Tavistock Clinic and heading a Woking family centre. There he uses a psychodynamic approach to 'keep disintegrating families together, even dangerous and difficult families'.

Mr McCaffrey says he would not return to Aycliffe, 'because I view the world differently now'. But he believes that Aycliffe still plays an important role: 'It's the last port of call for our most disturbed children,' he says.

One of the unforeseen results of the 1989 Children Act is the way it can undermine the authority of social workers because of the shift towards parental responsibility. This change has extended to care workers, restricting their options for controlling our most difficult children.

Mr McCaffrey describes Masud Hoghughi as courageous. 'Amid all the controversy, he implores us not to throw out the baby with the bath-water. He saw how the Children Act gave us increased responsibility, but tied our hands behind our backs.'

In the 1977 film, Mr Hoghughi, who has been at Aycliffe for 25 years, chillingly diagnosed 'a new disorder in children which has no precedent: children who are increasingly murderous and persistently suicidal in an ever-increasing spiral'.

Watching Aycliffe's Children, which is shown on Channel 4's Cutting Edge tonight, depressed him. 'We did the best we could and it wasn't enough.' But he says: 'If you were to bring cameras into Aycliffe today, you would see an even greater range of bizarre and disturbed behaviour. The children now are coming out with the most incredible horror stories of sexual and physical abuse.' Today, Aycliffe's children include an 11-year-old girl who killed a baby; a 16-year-old boy who tried to gas his family, and an 11-year-old girl with a frightening history of sexual and physical abuse, criminality, aggression and continual running away. 'These children are sophisticated failures when they arrive at Aycliffe,' Mr Hoghughi says.

The token economy still exists at Aycliffe, but today Mr Hoghughi also uses other methods, including a unit run by a cognitive therapist for children with severe aggression problems. 'I would try anything, even voodoo, if I thought it worked,' he says.

Does he share Mr McCaffrey's misgivings about the token economy? 'It's the people that count,' he says. 'Today Aycliffe has changed. We are gentler and more conscious that we may be compounding the abuse these children have experienced.

'But part of the tragedy is that here we are with all our faults - trailblazers, at the cutting edge of what is done for these children. In a sense, Aycliffe is the pathology laboratory of the nation: unless we identify the diseased processes of our society, we may never help.'

(Photographs omitted)