London’s Plans For New Schools

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 78, 6 August 1948, Page 5

London’s Plans For New Schools

(By Reece Smith, New Zealand Kemsley Empire Journalist)

FITTING PUPILS FOR LIFE’S WORK

London, July 15. Twenty-five years and £187,000,000 hence, the London County Council hopes to have completed a sweeping new school plan. There will be little recognisable left of the pre-war educational system. The Education Act, 1944, is the framework to which the L.C.C. educational authorities have adapted plans they had before the war, and on to which they will add embellishments of their own. With 1330 schools, 360,000 children and 13,500 teachers under it now, the L.C.C. does not come fresh and green to the problems of schooling. The 1944 Act requires the L.C.C. “to prepare a development plan for primary and secondary education which will secure opportunities for all pupils, of different ages, abilities and aptitudes, to have the most suitable instruction and training.” Threading through this formal purpose is the intent to spread the understanding that a skilled artisan is as worthy a cog in the community as the skilled professional man. There will be an end of trying to fit square boys, able with their hands, into the round holes of, say, the law, merely because the parents feel Hailsham so much more respectable than a spanner. Conversely, scholarly boys from working class families will not have to take up a spanner instead of a brief. This, of course, has for some time been the avowed aim of educationalists in many parts of the world. Both in aiming and firing New Zealand has been up with the leaders. The London plan is of interest, however (a) because of its magnitude, and (b) because the idea persists in New Zealand that an English boy who has not been to a public school has only a second best chance for the plums of life. Most striking feature of the new programme will be the comprehensive high schools. These schools will house all forms of secondary education. The classical- scholar and, the journeyman carpenter will sport the same Old School Tie. Destined to be co-educational, the comprehensive high schools will abide by the theory that no boy (or girl) .really knows Ay hat he wants to be, or has sufficiently discovered his natural aptitudes, till he is 13 or 14. That is, till he has been at high school a year or two. For the first year there will be scant differences in the courses taken by all pupils. It is clear that to sift out a sixth form in science there will have to be many, many third formers who, as they rise in the school, find themselves happier at the lathe or the Latin. Two thousand is the estimated roll of each of the comprehensive high schools, 10 of which are scheduled to start building this year or next.