The Bosco Centre, located at the eastern end of Jamaica Road, is home to a post 16 Vocational College, a nursery and youth club. At the heart of everything we do is our total commitment to improving the lives of local young people.
This passion and commitment has grown from the work of one person. A person who was born in the west of Scotland but who found her spiritual home in Bermondsey. Sister Cecily Dunn’s arrival in Rotherhithe was not expected. She had to be hastily evacuated from Liverpool after her relentless desire to help young people had angered the local drug dealers who saw that her powerful message was stripping them of their customers. This ability to disrupt for the good of young people was to characterise her for the rest of her life.
Sister Cecily followed the teachings of St John Bosco, another charismatic disrupter who had fought for the rights of young people two centuries earlier. He worked in Turin where he saw first hand the effects of industrialisation and urbanisation on the uneducated street children and how so often these children ended up in prison. St john Bosco was one of the first people to properly recognise the power of a vocational education and developed an educational philosophy based on love rather than punishment. This was the principal that under wrote all of Sister Cecily’s work and is still fundamental to everything we do today.
