Right on Track aims to provide a series of accredited training courses in motor maintenance leading to formal qualifications, and a wide variety of semi-structured courses. All the students, aged between 12 and 18, have been excluded from school. Around ninety per cent of them will have been involved in crime, and most will have had direct or indirect involvement in gangs.

It is based at a corporate go-kart track, revenues from which subsidise the project - and the tactic, as founder Jim Rushe put it to the Street Weapons Commission, is to “get them there with the karting, then sneak up on them with the education.” In the mornings, the students take conventional academic lessons, four GCSEs in core subjects, in class sizes of around 12-15. The lessons are taken by full-time teachers seconded from other schools. But in the afternoons, the students do vocational work on the kart track – towards GNVQ equivalent qualifications in motor mechanics and maintenance, which are recognised by the Open College of Manchester. The students refurbish public service vehicles such as ambulances which are then either reassigned to charities in this country or exported to the third world.

What works is giving something meaningful to do, and learn about, to young people for whom school isn’t suitable - and providing it consistently – day in, day out, with the same staff, and the same boundaries and rules. Jim says success is best measured through attendance. Getting them out of bed and in the building is the main achievement – and attendance at Right On Track is 94%.