Winlaton was intended as a maximum security centre for young women under sentence (i.e. those who had been committed to the care of the state for criminal offences).

A hostel, Leawarra, was opened in December 1959 to provide accommodation for inmates who were close to release and were attending outside schools or employment.

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.

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".

By 1956, the Government of Victoria had accepted the need for institutional change spurred on by earlier legislative amendments and broader definitions of those children who could be taken into care and made wards of the state.

By the 1950s the emphasis in reforming delinquents had moved from the eugenic and environmental to the educational, therefore creating a greater emphasis on education and methods by which the school system could prevent delinquency while juvenile justice systems incorporated school lessons and activities as part of their rehabilitation programmes.

When it was founded in 1956, Winlaton was promoted as a solution to female juvenile delinquency of all kinds: criminality, sexual promiscuity, homelessness or parental neglect.

Given its primary function as a maximum security facility for youth offenders Winlaton was, by all accounts from former residents, a harsh place and, in keeping with the thinking of the day, was unmistakably institutional.

These ranged from the very fact that a specialist education based maximum security facility was in itself experimental in the 1950s to radical "triad" therapy (1980s.

In the late 1980s-early 1990s the centre was renamed the "Nunawading Youth Residential Facility" and began accommodating boys aged 10 to 14 years.