THE controversial young persons' institution that was Aycliffe Centre For Children is now firmly in the past.

Many of the residential houses, which were once home to a number of 'troubled teens', are empty, boarded-up or adapted for classrooms and offices.

The infamous secure unit, which has housed some of the most notorious young criminals in the country, remains, and its future is safe for many years to come, following a contract from the Youth Justice Board for another five years.

Durham County Council, which took over the site fully after trustees signed it over in February this year, is now looking at how it can best adapt the 102-acre site to deliver a better more focused approach to youth services while maintaining the secure unit which has been praised for its "exceptionally high standards".

The controversy that saw the centre hit the headlines in the early 1990s when a Government report heavily criticised the "prison-style" regime is long gone.

The Head of Children's Services for the county council, Gail Hopper, and project leader Fiona McGlone, who has been brought in to look at how the centre can move on, have vowed that they want to continue to deliver a first-class service to help troubled young people.

Mrs Hopper said: "The way in which youth services are delivered is changing all the time and we need to move with those changes.

"We have a budget like everyone else. There is no extra funding coming our way and we have to generate what income we have to make the changes we need.''

One way of doing that is to sell some of the vast land, which is now redundant as more and more young people move into accommodation within the community.

Mrs McGlone said: "We realise that we have got too many buildings that we don't have a purpose for anymore. Yes, we may have to sell pockets of land, but it doesn't mean that there will be a big housing development.

"There is a covenant on the land and all the money will be ploughed back into children's services.''

There are a host of activities and services still housed on site, including the very successful Copelaw, aimed at teaching young people who are excluded from mainstream education, and there is talk of building one or two residential houses closer to the secure unit.

Mrs Hopper said that there was still a firm commitment to those services and stressed that no staff would lose jobs in the shake-up.

She said: "We do not know what it is going to look like in the future. There is no blueprint but we have fairly clear ideas of what it won't be.''