Winlaton Youth Training Centre - Administration

Administration

There was a special school on site which was administered and staffed by the Department of Education and was not under the control of the Winlaton superintendent. During the 1950s and 1960s, many State wards had been taken into care because of truancy (not attending school which was compulsory until the age of 15) However, once in care, children were commonly denied access to education. For example, at one point in the late 1960s, despite the population of Winbirra Remand Centre reaching about 40, the school took only 8 girls for classes. The centre had a permanent medical nurse on staff but called in doctors from outside to treat illness.

For most of the centre's history the superintendent was female as was the majority of the staff. From the 1980s onwards, the superintendents of Winlaton were referred to as ‘managers’ and the residents as ‘students’.

Due to changes in child welfare legislation and, fundamentally, moral and control panics about juvenile delinquency in the 1950s and 1960s, the number of girls increased throughout the 1950s and 1960s. However, the suitability of new inmates for a maximum security facility declined. Increasingly, the young women and girls sent to Winlaton had been detained not for criminal offences but had been made wards of the state under the Children's Welfare Act for either being “exposed to moral danger” or “likely to lapse into a life of vice or crime”. Young women who had been made wards of the state to protect them from abuse at home soon found themselves living in overcrowded facilities with young women under sentence from the courts.

Winlaton did not exist in a vacuum, nor was it the first attempt by the Victorian government to address the needs of young people and the community. Winlaton represented a new chapter in the larger history of Victorian welfare. Of particular significance are the decades immediately preceding the opening of Winlaton. Changes to legislation, accommodation facilities and approaches to juvenile care and juvenile justice which occurred in the 1950s set the scene for the opening of Winlaton and defined the parameters within which Winlaton functioned.