What happened
On 9 December 2022 a 14-month-old boy was in the baby room at Fairytales Day Nursery on Bourne Street in Dudley. CCTV, later played to a court, showed him wrapped tightly in blankets and a sleeping bag, with a blanket over his head, face down on a soft cushion inside a teepee.
A nursery practitioner put her leg across his lower back and held him there for seven minutes. The prosecution described it as an attempt to make him sleep. She believed he had fallen asleep and left him. Staff did not physically check on him for about two hours. He was found unresponsive at about 15:15 and pronounced dead in hospital an hour later.
The outcome
At Wolverhampton Crown Court on 17 April 2026, Mr Justice Choudhury sentenced the practitioner, 23, to three years and four months for gross negligence manslaughter, which she had admitted.
Fairytales Day Nursery Limited had admitted corporate manslaughter and an offence under the Health and Safety at Work Act, and was fined £240,000 with £56,000 in costs. The owner and director, 55, was given six months’ imprisonment suspended for two years and disqualified from being a director for seven years. She had admitted a health and safety offence on the basis that she did not know children were put to sleep this way, though she should have. The nursery is no longer in operation.
What went wrong
The judge found the risk of death was foreseeable, and that the practitioner was not a rogue actor: “much of what she did was accepted practice”. He said it was only blind luck another practitioner was not in the same position.
The hold was not a secret. It was how the baby room settled children, and the detective who led the case said CCTV showed other children wrapped the same way and left face down with blankets over their heads in the 28 days before the death.
Sleeping pods designed for outdoor camping should never have been introduced. They did not comply with NHS sleep guidance, could be too hot indoors, and their soft surface could surround a baby’s head and face. The nursery accepted that management did not challenge the culture.
What it teaches
Restraint used to produce sleep is still restraint. A leg across a child’s back is a hold, and the purpose, settling a baby, does not make it a care technique.
The second failure is arithmetic. Seven minutes of holding was followed by about two hours with no physical check. A camera is not a physical check.
The third is the manager. The owner said she did not know, and the judge held that she should have.
Questions for the room
- Seven minutes held, then two hours unchecked. Which of those would your setting have caught?
- You are a new practitioner shown this way of settling a baby. What do you do, and who do you tell?
- The judge said another practitioner could have been in the same position. What makes that impossible?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: confirmed. The précis records that the Crown Prosecution Service’s own outcome statement and the BBC’s court reporting agree on the sentences, the figures and the judge’s remarks.
The child is named in the record and in open court reporting. This page does not name him or his family, and gives only what the finding needs.
The practitioner and the director were both convicted, so naming them would be permitted. Neither is named, because the practice is the subject. Proceedings concluded on 17 April 2026, so the page may be cited outward.
Our restraint reduction training for schools and early years covers what counts as restraint when the aim is compliance rather than safety.
Sources
Reviewed 20 October 2026.