Industrial School

In England, the 1857 Industrial Schools Act was intended to solve problems of juvenile vagrancy, by removing poor and neglected children from their home environment to a boarding school. The Act allowed magistrates to send disorderly children to a residential industrial school. An 1876 Act led to non-residential day schools of a similar kind.

There were similar arrangements in Scotland, where the Industrial Schools Act came into force in 1866. The schools cared for neglected children and taught them a trade, with an emphasis on preventing crime. Glasgow Industrial School for Girls is an example formed in 1882.

They were distinct from reformatories set up under the 1854 Youthful Offenders Act (the Reformatory Schools Act) which included an element of punishment. Both agreed in 1927 to call themselves approved schools.

In Ireland, the Industrial Schools Act of 1868 established industrial schools (Irish: scoileanna saothair) to care for "neglected, orphaned and abandoned children". By 1884 there were 5,049 children in such institutions.

An Industrial Feeding School was opened in Aberdeen in 1846. Industrial Schools like the co-temporous Ragged schools were set up by volunteers to help destitute children but they believed that an education was not enough, these children needed to be removed from the harmful environment of the street, and trained to be industrious and given a trade they could practise.

Some schools were residential but other children were 'day-boys'. The regime was severe, with a tightly timetabled daily routine that stretched from waking at 6.00am going to bed at 7.00pm. During the day there were set times for religion and moral guidance, formal schooling, doing housework, eating, learning trades, with three invervals for play. The boys trades were gardening, tailoring and shoemaking; the girls learned housework and washing, knitting, and sewing.

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