Industrial school

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, British courts treated children who committed crimes the same way they treated adults. A nine-year-old could be sentenced to death, though the penalty was rarely carried out. Two fifteen-year-olds could be transported for seven years for stealing a pair of boots.1 By the 1840s, reformers began arguing that putting children in prison alongside adult offenders was producing better criminals, not reformed citizens.

The Reformatory Schools Act of 1854 created institutions for children convicted of crimes, as an alternative to adult prison. Three years later, the Industrial Schools Act of 1857 established a parallel system for a different category of children entirely: those who had not committed crimes but were considered at risk of becoming criminals.2

Courts could commit children to industrial schools for begging, vagrancy, homelessness, or simply for having a parent who had been sent to prison. By 1875, there were 50 industrial schools in England alone. At their peak in 1898, 71 schools in the twenty-six counties of Ireland held nearly 8,000 children.3 In the same year, roughly 6,000 children were housed in workhouses under considerably worse conditions.

The schools taught what their name implied. Boys learned trades such as shoemaking, tailoring, or agricultural labor. Girls were trained in domestic service. Some schools operated naval training ships, preparing boys for careers at sea aboard old wooden hulks anchored in river estuaries.4 The regime was strict, and conditions varied enormously. Overcrowding, poor diet, and contagious disease were common. Over 70 percent of children committed to Irish industrial schools in 1882 were there for begging.5

The Children Act of 1908, known as the Children's Charter, replaced the patchwork of nineteenth-century legislation with a unified system and created separate juvenile courts.6 In 1933, reformatory and industrial schools were merged into a single category called approved schools.