thumb|Connaught House 1887 – A Church of England Industrial School in Winchester.
Industrial schools were intended to solve problems of juvenile vagrancy in England by removing poor and neglected children from their home environment to a boarding school. The Industrial Schools Act 1857 (20 & 21 Vict. c. 48) allowed magistrates to send disorderly children to a residential industrial school. An 1876 act Elementary Education Act 1876 (39 & 40 Vict. c. 70) 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 Youthful Offenders Act 1854 (17 & 18 Vict. c. 86) (and the Reformatory Schools (Scotland) Act 1854 (17 & 18 Vict. c. 74)) which included an element of punishment. Both agreed in 1927 to call themselves approved schools.
In Ireland, the Industrial Schools Act (Ireland) 1868 (31 & 32 Vict. c. 25) established industrial schools () to care for "neglected, orphaned and abandoned children". By 1884 there were 5,049 children in such institutions.
Context
An Industrial Feeding School was opened in Aberdeen in 1846. Industrial schools, like the contemporaneous ragged schools, were set up by volunteers to help destitute children. Their philosophy differed in that they believed that an education was not enough: these children needed to be removed from the harmful environment of the street, trained to be industrious, and given a trade they could practise.
Elizabeth Pithie is believed to have been a student before her wages were paid to be a missionary in 1879 in what is now Malawi.
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 to bedtime at 7:00pm.
During the day there were set times for religion and moral guidance, formal schooling, doing housework, eating, and learning trades, with three intervals for play. The boys' trades were gardening, tailoring, and shoemaking; the girls learned housework and washing, knitting, and sewing.
Financial accountability
The intention was that the cost of attending such a school would be met by the parents, which was an interesting concept for a child who was sent there because he was already homeless. The state had to provide. The system expanded rapidly, and magistrates preferred to send miscreants to a school rather than a reformatory. There was public unrest about the mounting cost.