The Home Office approved plans to carry out drug trials on children at two schools for young offenders in the 1960s, according to files released by the National Archives.
Research by BBC Radio 4’s Today programme revealed that, without the knowledge of their parents, teenage boys at Richmond Hill approved school in North Yorkshire were given the anticonvulsant drug Beclamide over a period of six months in 1968 in an attempt to improve their behaviour.
Plans to trial the anti-psychotic drug Haloperidol on teenage girls at Springhead Park approved school in Rothwell, near Leeds, were also given the green light, but later rejected by the school’s headmistress, Shelagh Sunner.
Modelled on boarding schools, approved schools were residential institutions for young people who had committed criminal offences or were deemed to be beyond parental control. They were funded and inspected by the Home Office but run by voluntary organisations.
Following the Children and Young Persons Act 1969, they were replaced by community homes, which were run by local councils.
National Archives files include correspondence between three doctors – all of whom have since died – discussing plans for the drug trials.
In a letter from 1967, Dr JR Hawkins, a psychiatrist working at Richmond Hill, wrote to the Home Office asking permission to test the drugs on boys who were “impulsive, explosive, irritable, restless and aggressive”.
Hawkings said this would be “a perfectly normal and legitimate therapy for certain types of disturbed adolescent” and that the drugs had not yet been widely tested on such boys.
According to a letter dated November 1967, Home Office psychiatrist Dr Pamela Mason welcomed Hawkings’s plan. “From the clinical or practical point of view these are the boys that can produce considerable problems within a school and this sort of research into possible drug treatment is to be welcomed,” she said. “I would recommend maximum support for this project.”
In November 1968, Dr Joyce Galbraith, a psychiatrist working at Springhead Park, also wrote to Mason saying she was increasingly concerned about unrest at the school.
She suggested giving Haloperidol to every girl in the school for 18 weeks. “My suggestion is that we should try some form of drug trial to see if, by allaying the anxiety of the girls chemically, we might perhaps settle the school a little bit more, and give the staff an opportunity to put their own house in order,” she wrote.
