Where did Ireland get the idea for industrial schools? From those go-getting Protestants to the east of them:

The Industrial Schools Act was intended in 1857 to solve problems of juvenile vagrancy in England 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 nonresidential 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,^[1] 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.

Well yes, it sounds so much more benign, doesn’t it.

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.

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.

In other words it was prison for children.

H/t latsot