October of that year a special rate of grant was instituted in respect of expenditure by local education authorities for higher education under Section 86 of the Education Act, 1921, in the promotion of social and physical training, more especially through local Juvenile Organisations Committees. The special grant was limited, in the first instance, to a period of twelve months ending on 30th September, 1925, but this period was extended and the special grant did not finally terminate until 31st March, 1927. In a Circular announcing the continuance of this grant, the policy of the Board was outlined in these terms:

"This will carry the special allowance up to the date from which the programmes of local education authorities to be submitted in response to Circular No. 1358 will begin to run. The Board have no doubt that local education authorities, in formulating their programmes, will consider their policy in regard to the development of the work of juvenile organisations and particularly of Juvenile Organisations Committees, but the Board feel that it would be undesirable to continue special rates of grant, instituted as a temporary measure, into the period covered by regular programmes."

"

206. The record of the last year shows that the special rate of grant was instrumental in procuring for a number of Juvenile Organisations Committees either a greatly increased grant or a grant for the first time from local education authorities. In certain areas, where a large grant has been made, great developments have proved possible, and it is recorded that the work of the voluntary associations affiliated to the Juvenile Organisations Committee has been greatly encouraged. Moreover, Juvenile Organisations Committees have been formed or revived at Bexhill, Bootle, Castleford, Croydon, Gloucestershire, Halifax, Hastings, Hendon, Kent, Oxfordshire, Plymouth, Reigate, Sheffield, South Shields, Wimbledon, Winchester, Woolwich and Worthing.

207. During the year, the Central Juvenile Organisations Committee considered various questions and addressed letters to local Juvenile Organisations Committees on the National Playing Fields Association and Club Libraries. In the first letter, the Committee suggested that co-operation should be secured so far as possible between local Juvenile Organisations Committees and any local branch which might be set up by the National Association in organising their campaign throughout the country. In the second letter, the Committee announced that the Trustees of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust had decided to make small grants to assist in the promotion or development of libraries in Boys' and Girls' Clubs, as a means of encouraging the habit of reading, and had invited the Committees of the National Organisation of Girls' Clubs and the National Association of Boys' Clubs to assist them in

the administration of the proposed scheme. Particulars were enclosed of the conditions under which these grants could be obtained.

A letter was also issued in which the assistance rendered by Rotary Clubs in certain areas was mentioned.

208. In February, 1926, the Committee considered and adopted a memorandum of evidence for presentation to the Committee appointed by the President of the Board of Education and the Minister of Labour on Education and Industry. The evidence given by the Committee included inter alia the following points :-The elementary school leaving age as bearing on recruitment to industry; the development of advanced elementary school instruction, for example, in central schools with a later leaving age than the elementary schools, as providing a somewhat older recruit to industry; Juvenile Unemployment Centres; the age of entry into unemployment insurance; workshop training; the training of juvenile workers in technical schools, etc., in relation particularly to retention of suitable employment, and the official arrangements for advising boys and girls and placing them in employment.

209. The Right Honourable Sir J. Herbert Lewis resigned the office of Chairman during the year. We desire to express our sense of the great service which he rendered to the Committee during his tenure of this office. He was succeeded by Her Grace the Duchess of Atholl, D.B.E., M.P., the Parliamentary Secretary to the Board.

210. We do not here enter into detail on the subject of the work of local Juvenile Organisations Committees because this has been the subject of a document "Notes on Work and Progress of Local Committees, No. 6. Summer 1926" issued by the Juvenile Organisations Committee. Copies of this document may be obtained without payment from the Secretary of the Committee at our Offices.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE TRAINING OF TEACHERS.

211. As was stated in our Report for the year 1924-25, the report of the departmental committee appointed in March 1923 to review the arrangements for the training of teachers for public elementary schools was issued in April 1925, and its recommendations immediately received the Board's careful consideration. Their policy with regard to one of the most important of the problems before the Committee was indicated in Circular 1372, issued on 11th December, 1925, in which they fixed definite dates after which the Preliminary Examination for the Certificate and the Certificate Examination for Acting Teachers would cease to be held. They also invited proposals from the authorities of training colleges for alternative methods of examination to replace the existing Final Examination for the Board's Certificate.

212. The Board's policy with regard to the other matters dealt with in the departmental committee's report was embodied in new Regulations for the Training of Teachers, which were issued in draft in June 1926, and explained in a covering Circular No. 1377. These regulations were framed on the lines which had been decided upon in all the regulations of the Board, and were confined, so far as possible, to the statement of the conditions upon which training colleges could be recognised, and upon which grants could be paid, the responsibility for determining the particular means by which these general conditions could best be satisfied being left mainly to local education authorities and governing bodies of training colleges, subject, where necessary, to the approval of the Board. At the same time, definite changes were introduced into the regulations in order to carry out those recommendations of the departmental committee which the Board considered could now be made conditions of grant.

1. Preliminary Education.

213. The departmental committee recommended that intending teachers should, as far as practicable, receive continuous full-time education in secondary schools up to the age of 18. With the increase in the number of secondary schools and of advanced courses at those schools, and concurrently with the greater demands made upon the teachers by successive advances in the leaving age of children in public elementary schools, the number of candidates for admission to training colleges who have remained at the secondary school until the normal conclusion of the course, has grown steadily

until this can be said, with the exception of certain rural areas, to be the ordinary preliminary education for intending teachers. This tendency is entirely in accordance with the generally accepted view that the teaching profession should, so far as possible, be recruited from among men and women who have completed the same course of general education as that recognised as a proper preparation for entry into other careers.

214. The committee, however, while holding out this universal full-time attendance at a secondary school as an ideal which might be fulfilled by intending teachers in some ten years from now, were unable to recommend either previous attendance at a secondary school or full-time attendance until the age of 18, as conditions which could be universally imposed at present. There is still a considerable body of entrants to the profession who follow one or other of the alternative courses of preliminary instruction and training which have been accepted under successive regulations of the Board. In rural areas where secondary schools are not readily available, there are rural pupil-teachers who from the age of 14 follow a four years' course of part-time education combined with training in teaching as pupil-teachers. Elsewhere there are pupilteachers who remain under full-time instruction up to the age of 16, and then for two years combine their training with part-time instruction. Both the full-time instruction up to the age of 16, and the part-time instruction following it may be taken either at a secondary school or at a pupil-teacher centre, which may either be an independent institution, or attached to an elementary school. Finally, the intending teacher may remain in full-time instruction in a secondary school until the age of 17, and then may spend a year of part-time instruction at that school and part-time employment as a student-teacher in a public elementary school. The system of pupil-teachership is a development of the once universal method of recruiting elementary school teachers directly from the elementary schools, or an adaptation of it, after the coming into operation of the Education Act of 1902, to the conditions of secondary schools. Student-teachers are the outcome of the Regulations of 1907 which inaugurated special grants in aid of the instruction and maintenance of intending teachers under the name of Bursars at secondary schools, and provided that if they did not spend their eighteenth year entirely at the secondary school they might be employed as student-teachers and obtain practice in teaching under supervision in a public elementary school. This provision, intended largely as an exception, was adopted more often than was anticipated.

215. The Board concur in the views of the departmental committee, and share the hope that a full secondary school education up to the age of 18 will be increasingly accepted as the proper qualification of a candidate for admission to a training college, but they also concur with the committee in thinking that it is not

possible at present to prescribe full-time attendance at a secondary school as a necessary condition for this purpose. Accordingly, they provided in their draft regulations for the recognition of pupilteachers and student-teachers as a temporary measure in areas where there was a sufficient number of suitable candidates for the teaching profession for whose education provision could not be made at a secondary school up to the age of 18. Authorities were, however, asked to consider seriously whether, after August 1927, studentteacherships should be continued in any area, and whether both student-teachers and pupil teachers under part-time instruction at a secondary school might not receive during their final year-17 to 18a maintenance allowance instead of salary. At the same time, the draft regulations contained a notification that grant would not be payable to pupil-teacher centres in non-provided secondary schools after 31st July, 1928, while it was laid down that any pupil-teacher centre must comply, so far as the Board might require, with the regulations for secondary schools.

216. It was represented to the Board, however, by several authorities, that even though provision existed in their areas for the education at secondary schools of sufficient suitable candidates for the teaching profession, there were other considerations which rendered desirable in those areas the continuance of an alternative source of supply. Apart from the argument duly considered by the departmental committee that the year of practice in teaching before entering a training college is in itself of value, it was urged that the parents of the poorer classes would be discouraged from allowing their children to aim at becoming teachers unless they were assured at an early stage of their fitness for the profession. Such parents demand that their children should obtain definite employment as teachers at about the same age as they would in the normal course enter upon work of any other character. This demand is satisfied. at present by appointment with salary as a pupil-teacher or studentteacher, even though the first year of the employment consists entirely in continued attendance at a secondary school. It would not be met were the candidate to remain until the age of 18 at the secondary school, even though he or she might be granted a maintenance allowance equivalent in amount to the student-teacher's or pupil-teacher's salary. The candidate would still have before him. two years at least in a training college before taking up a post as a teacher, and in view of the new requirement of a year's probationary service before confirmation of recognition as a certificated teacher (see par. 56 above), he might arrive at the age of 21 before being secured in his profession. Such a long period of purely preparatory instruction, familiar as it may be in other walks of life would, it was represented to the Board, act as a deterrent to candidates and their parents, and the course which is generally regarded as likely to improve the quality of the teaching profession would prove seriously inimical to the supply of teachers.