Institutional Training 71 



and, if not, for no sort of work at all. Must we not agitate 

 then for a large increase of industrial training in the 

 schools ? " 1 



It is the members of group 2, the boys who never reach 

 the fifth standard, but find their mental powers taxed " to the 

 utmost in the lowest classes," who are saved from " passing out 

 as errand boys, van boys and shop boys," &c., by just the 

 kind of training received in an Industrial School, and who are 

 the most likely to become the efficient skilled and unskilled 

 workers of the future. The day of Juvenile Labour Exchanges 

 and After-Care Committees has now dawned. But hitherto 

 it has been an advantage of institutions over ordinary schools 

 that there has always been someone whose duty at any rate 

 it was to see that every child had a suitable start in life. 



3. Lack of home influence. Miss Williams in her Report 

 on " Out-Relief Children " says : 



" We may well ask, would not the pauper child be better in 

 an institution of this kind (Ponteland), rather than in an 

 average Out-Relief Home ? 



" I take it that what every child wants, and what every 

 home which is reasonably good gives, is a certain stability in 

 life, a sense that there is one place, one little group, to whom 

 it stands in a unique relation, and who regard it as they regard 

 no one else, a point to which under any circumstances it can 

 turn. 



" When a pauper child goes out to work is the time when 

 the need of this relation is most keenly felt, and I have had it 

 borne in upon me during the last few months that many of the 

 children who fall under the influence of unsatisfactory relatives, 

 when they go out from the Poor Law Institution to a situation, 

 do so because they want this very thing, something that 

 belongs to them and them only." z 



Of the six institutions whose records I have investigated, 



1 Ibid., p. 154. 



2 Report on Poor Law Children, p. 85. 



