Cookham Wood inspection report 2021
Report for Cookham Wood Prison
Summary
Providing relatively new accommodation, Cookham Wood in Kent is a wellestablished young offender institution (YOI) that has been largely redeveloped in recent years. The institution can hold up to 188 boys between the ages of 15 and 18, but due to reductions in the population of children in custody during the COVID-19 pandemic, at the time of our inspection there were just 87 boys in residence. Coming from the greater part of south and south-east England, these boys had varying status, ranging from those recently remanded to those serving indeterminate sentences for the most serious of offences. The risks associated with the detention of such young people mean that this is the latest in a series of annual inspections, although there was some interruption during the pandemic. When we last fully inspected Cookham Wood in 2019, we were concerned to find that outcomes for children were not sufficiently good against any of our four tests of a healthy institution. At this inspection we found they had not improved and had in fact worsened in our purposeful activity test, where outcomes were now poor.