An independent review of progress reports that out of nine recommendations, good or reasonable progress had been made towards eight of them in HMYOI Feltham. A recent report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons shows that outcomes for the children in the institution have significantly improved since 2019.

Since its previous inspection, HMYOI Feltham have appointed a new governor. The report notes that this transition had been managed well by the Youth Custody Service (YCS) in order to facilitate progress. On appointment, the governor addressed the previous reports’ recommendations at the earliest opportunity to place leaders in a good position to work on improvements.

Improvements have been made in equality in order to ensure systems for redress operated efficiently. This process was also overseen by new management so that they could identify if any minority groups had suffered any unequal treatment in their areas of responsibility. Since the inspection, 128 complaints and 25 discrimination incident report forms had been submitted by children. almost all of these were answered within the prescribed timescale. The report considered that the prison had made good progress in this area.

Greater focus has been put on providing children with education or training placements for when they are released. This has been done by organising resettlement planning more effectively and by encouraging prison staff to challenge community partners with greater consistency.

Charlie Taylor, Chief Inspector of Prisons, said:

“This is the third positive report in succession about Feltham A. The governor and her team have worked well to consolidate previous improvements and build on them. This leaves the establishment well placed to address the challenges that remain.”

One of the key focuses for improvement was access to purposeful activity. A new core day was introduced providing children with more time in education and access to vocational training. This increased the children of HMYOI’s time out of cell an extra hour during the week and more than doubled it on weekends, improving to 6.5 hours from the previous 2.5. The report however recommends that children should have 10 hours a day out of their cells.

The only recommendation that had not seen any progress was safeguarding. The report recommends that ‘staff should adhere to policies which ensure children are properly safeguarded during the night’ after finding breaches of ‘important safety procedures’. In a previous inspection it was found that ambulances were not always called when a medical emergency code was used. During this inspection, the report notes there were some examples of good practice with an emergency code being called, but this did not result in a request for an ambulance being made.

For the full report click here.