Featherstone Prison: Families and significant others strategy 2025
Featherstone’s family strategy outlines how we support prisoners in our care to develop meaningful and constructive relationships with their family or significant others.
Applies to England and Wales
Our commitment to you
Coming to prison can be a scary time and we understand that having support is important to everyone in life, whether you are in prison or not.
Support and contact doesn’t just include immediate family but extends to friends and can include professionals.
In our strategy when we refer to ‘Family’ this can mean a relative or significant people that our prisoner identifies as providing a constructive and supportive relationship to them.
What we aim to do
- Support prisoners and families in maintaining good relationships.
- Help improve parenting skills for prisoners and guide them through their children’s educational experiences.
- Provide advice and guidance to families and prisoners, keeping the family-friendly focus.
- Offer support with troubled relationships.
- Reduce / remove barriers to enable family members to visit the prison so they can experience quality visits in a welcoming environment.
- Involve families in resettlement, the sentence planning process and in times of crisis, where appropriate.
- To establish links with local authorities in the support of families and children.
- To better inform and train staff on children and family issues.
Support and services offered
At Featherstone we have several partners who support our families and significant others strategy.
Our main partner is PACT who hold a 5-year contract for families and significant others work until late 2027.
Family support
We have a family engagement manager who supports our families service both inside HMP Featherstone and in our visits centre.
They support the day-to-day work our PACT staff complete and work alongside the prison for our family strategy.
Our family engagement worker spends their time helping prisoners to maintain a good level of family contact while they are in custody as well as our support workers who support the work the family engagement worker does and provides support to visitors,
Family engagement work
Our family engagement worker will support prisoners with any individual issues they may have regarding contact and communication with their families.
They also help with rebuilding those relationships which may have broken down over time and support those prisoners who do not receive visits from their families.
They provide:
- one-to-one emotional and practical parenting support
- support for prisoners with maintaining family links and improving breakdown in communication and relationship issues
- family mediation and support for contact issues with children
- advocacy on behalf of our prisoners and their families and support with signposting to other agencies
Visitors’ centre
Our visitors’ centre is open from:
- midday on afternoon visits days
- 8:30 am on Saturday morning visits
Visitors can come early to buy refreshments and relax before their visit.
We provide lockers for visitors to secure their belongings.
When you arrive at the visits centre your identification will be checked for security purposes.
You will then be asked to comply with our biometric process.
This is an electronic system that uses fingerprint technology to check your identity.
We will take your fingerprint for our records only and your photograph - these will remain on our records while you visit our establishment.
Each time you attend the prison you will still need to bring your paper ID in case our electronic system has technical issues.
Support workers in the visitors’ centre can explain and answer your questions about visits and other prison processes.
Telling a child that a loved one is in prison can be difficult. The support workers can support the parents and carers of prisoner’s children or grandchildren to do this using ‘Locked Out’ books. (You can find these in our visitors’ centre.)
Our visitors’ centre staff provide support for visitors signing in for visits sessions.
They also support for first time visitors to discuss our visits procedures and answer any questions. They can also direct visitors to any support they may require.
Letters for children
PACT provide letter-writing packs for the visitors’ centre. These packs encourage children to write letters to their relatives and are free.
Please speak to the visitors’ centre staff if you would like a writing pack.
Children’s play facilities
At our visitors’ centre we have an outdoor play facility which is safely screened so children can play outdoors.
Within our visits room we have a dedicated children’s play area.
Visitors’ centre staff provide structured play in the visitors’ centre and the visits room for children visiting.
They also provide structured play for any children with neurodiverse needs.
We provide resources to support any children or visitors with neurodiverse needs, for example, ear defenders.
If you would like to use these resources, please speak to the PACT staff in the centre.
Foreign national phone credit and letters
Foreign national prisoners are entitled to convert their standard visiting orders to phone credit to make calls abroad or airmail letters.
Family days
In partnership with the prison, PACT runs 11 family days through the year.
These are smaller, more relaxed visits that designed to aid bonding with children.
Family visits are always themed, especially at times of the year like Christmas and Easter. They are full of fun with activities that you can all join in with together as a family unit.
Family visits are held on a Friday once a month from 10am until 2pm.
Lunch is provided by the prison and PACT run craft activities for all to share together.
Our staff can take photographs at family days when consent is given. We understand photographs can be very precious and sometimes rare for those with a family member in prison.
It is not always possible to grant each applicant a place on every family visits day as numbers are restricted. We do all we can to ensure it is shared out fairly.
In 2025, 6 of these days are during the school holidays so that education and routine is not disrupted.
If your child’s school need for confirmation they have attended a family visit, we can provide this.
Library
Our library team run ‘Storybook Dads’. This is where a prisoner can record a bedtime story for their children which is then posted to their child.
Storybook Dads is approved once we can confirm it is approved for the prisoner to send this to their child.
Safeguarding measures
At Featherstone we follow HMPPS’ procedures on safeguarding for people in our care including vulnerable adults. Safeguarding applies to our prisoners but also visitors both adults and children.
Where abuse is reported to or suspected by any person the response will be prompt and in line with prison service policies.
The prison works as a multi-agency team to meet the needs of prisoners in ensuring that they remain safe.
See Featherstone Prison’s main GOV.UK page for contact details if you have a safeguarding concern.
For further reference to safeguarding measures, please see the HMPPS Child Safeguarding Policy Framework.
What have we achieved?
- Over the last two years we have increased our visits spaces by nearly 3,200 a year.
- Our establishment hosted its first football and rugby event.
- Our ‘X’ page is up and running with updates as well as success stories.
- Friends and family focus groups continue to happen in visits with the families champion.
- We continue to help support prisoners and their families in maintaining their family ties by facilitating visits and family days including for those who have difficulty in attending regular social visits.
- We hold a yearly veteran’s event for prisoners and staff to attend together.
- Our offender management unit team hosted a lifer / long-term prisoners family visit day.
- Safer custody provide 4 family visits to listeners, violence reps, and other key prisoner representatives.
- We have introduced new themes into family visits which have been well received.
- Purchased Key Stage 1 and 2 books in visits so prisoners can read with their child.
You said, we did
Your feedback is important for us to make sure we provide the best visits experience.
Here is how we use your feedback to keep improving:
- better selection of refreshments during visits
- more toys and games for children
- a wider variety of games have now been ordered to suit a larger age range
- sandwiches in visits with meat, fish and vegetarian option which are also halal
- we now provide hot croissants on Saturday morning visits
- schedule as many family visits in school holidays as possible
What is our focus this year?
From feedback, prisoners who don’t receive visits is an area that needs support.
We are going to hold focus groups with prisoners who don’t receive visits to understand what stops them having visits and what support we can provide.
Care leavers
Those with experience of the care system are more likely to have experienced significant trauma and abuse and other disadvantage that can put them more at risk of violence, self-harm and suicide when in prison.
Many also have experiences of being failed by their corporate parents and can come to prison feeling extremely isolated and angry.
Care leavers are entitled to support up until they are 25 years old, so linking in with local authorities is vital in supporting care leavers in our care.
We will take guidance from the HMPPS Strategy for Care Experienced People, learning from best practice and lived experiences within the document.
This document highlights the importance of linking in with local authorities to enable as much information as possible to given to those within our care.
Staff at HMP Featherstone are keen to support those who have been through the care system. We appreciate that some may have been through exceptionally traumatic times in their lives may need additional support.
Within the offender management unit, we have ‘Care Champions’ who can offer specialist support and referral to services designed to help those with experience in the care sector.
We have a care leaver lead and deputy lead for the prison.