Cookham Wood inspection report 2020
Report for Cookham Wood Prison
Summary
(ROTL) assessments and public protection work were not sufficiently robust and in our survey just a quarter of children told us they thought someone was helping them with their release. The lack of suitable accommodation for children being released was very concerning. In the coming year, progress at Feltham will hopefully ease population pressures at Cookham Wood and the prospect of new staff provides some assurance that managers will be better placed to resolve the problems we identified. At this inspection we saw many hard-working staff and managers, and some improvements were evident, but so was some deterioration. We leave the institution with a number of recommendations which we hope will assist improvement. Priorities we identify include an insistence on higher standards of living conditions and children’s behaviour, a need for a more active regime that incentivises and engages young people and a more robust and better coordinated delivery of effective resettlement services.