DAY INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS

We saw in the first chapter of this book that both indigent and neglected children could be committed by a court to an industrial school under the terms of the Industrial Schools Act, 1866, in an effort to insulate them against bad influences and to provide positive influences in their place. This could only be achieved by removing the child or young person from his or her own home and requiring him or her to live in the industrial school as a residential establishment. However, when the cause of the child's difficulties was not bad parental influence, the school was able to permit a child “to lodge at the dwelling of his parent or of any trustworthy or respectable person”. In that case, the obligation remained on the school managers to feed and clothe the child, and the entirely benign effect of that arrangement was to provide some direct assistance to the parent bringing up the child and to provide some education to the child without in fact requiring the child's removal from the parent. Some industrial schools were unsuited to provide accommodation and had been set up as day schools. The earliest is generally recognised as having been established in Aberdeen in 1841. In Glasgow, under the terms of a local Act, the Glasgow Juvenile Delinquency Prevention and Repression Act, 1878, there was established (on a site now occupied, curiously enough, by the University of Strathclyde) the Rotten Row Day Industrial School. Schools such as these usually started out taking voluntary admissions, but as day schools became progressively integrated into the industrial school system, the voluntary element evaporated. As well, the underlying welfarist ethos of day industrial schools tended in time to be subverted by the different ethos of residential industrial schools which had, in Kelly's words “a predominantly disciplinary character”.

Statutory regulation of day industrial schools first appeared with the Day Industrial Schools (Scotland) Act, 1893, which allowed the Secretary for Scotland to certify a school as a day industrial school for the purpose of both educating and feeding children sent to it: this still operated as a mechanism for the support of children who were permitted to remain at home. Most of the provisions of the 1893 Act were replaced by ss.