Editing Workhouse (section)

===Education===
[[File:Children at crumpsall workhouse circa 1895.jpg|thumb|A group of children at [[Crumpsall]] Workhouse, 1895–97]]
Education was provided for the children,{{sfnp|Higginbotham|2006|p=19|ps=none}} but workhouse teachers were a particular problem. Poorly paid, without any formal training, and facing large classes of unruly children with little or no interest in their lessons, few stayed in the job for more than a few months.{{sfnp|Fowler|2007|pp=134–135|ps=none}} In an effort to force workhouses to offer at least a basic level of education, legislation was passed in 1845 requiring that all pauper apprentices should be able to read and sign their own [[indenture]] papers.{{sfnp|Fowler|2007|p=135|ps=none}} A training college for workhouse teachers was set up at [[Kneller Hall]] in [[Twickenham]] during the 1840s, but it closed in the following decade.{{sfnp|Fowler|2007|p=134|ps=none}}

Some children were trained in skills valuable to the area.  In [[Shrewsbury]], the boys were placed in the workhouse's workshop, while girls were tasked with [[Spinning (textiles)|spinning]], making gloves and other jobs "suited to their sex, their ages and abilities".  At [[St Martin in the Fields]], children were trained in spinning [[flax]], picking hair and [[carding]] wool, before being placed as apprentices.  Workhouses also had links with local industry; in [[Nottingham]], children employed in a cotton mill earned about £60 a year for the workhouse.  Some parishes advertised for apprenticeships, and were willing to pay any employer prepared to offer them.  Such agreements were preferable to supporting children in the workhouse: apprenticed children were not subject to inspection by justices, thereby lowering the chance of punishment for neglect; and apprenticeships were viewed as a better long-term method of teaching skills to children who might otherwise be uninterested in work.  Supporting an apprenticed child was also considerably cheaper than the workhouse or outdoor relief.{{sfnp|Honeyman|2007|pp=21–23|ps=none}}  Children often had no say in the matter, which could be arranged without the permission or knowledge of their parents.{{sfnp|Higginbotham|2006|p=19|ps=none}}  The supply of labour from workhouse to factory, which remained popular until the 1830s, was sometimes viewed as a form of [[penal transportation|transportation]].  While getting parish apprentices from [[Clerkenwell]], [[Samuel Oldknow]]'s agent reported how some parents came "crying to beg they may have their Children out again".  Historian Arthur Redford suggests that the poor may have once shunned factories as "an insidious sort of workhouse".{{sfnp|Redford|1976|pp=24–25|ps=none}}