The Education Department.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20494, 12 March 1932, Page 14

The Education Department.

It is unfortunate, in connexion wit.li the economies recommended in the Education Department, that the Committee should have gone a good deal further than economy. It is not a committee of experts in education, and it is a pity therefore, that it should have considered, itself competent to discuss policy as well as costs. A Committee that would liava been competent to do that was promised by the Government and then forgotten, but that is not a reason why we should have had a report by amateurs. On the other hand the things that the Committee iaz competent to do it has .generally .done well, however drastic some of its proposals, may scund, and prove, in practice. It would certainly be wise to save what can be saved—tlie Committee's estimate only £lß,ooo—by raising the age of admission from five to six, anfl by ciosing two of the Training Colleges. Ihe allowances paid to Training College students are also far too generous, now that, it is no longer necessary to offer special inducements to recruits to maintain the service at full strength. Of the other major economies recommended the most substantial are the proposed extraction of seventy-five thousand pounds from the salaries of women teachers doine the same work as

men, which can be justified only because it would save money without doing much harm, and the saving of fifty thousand pounds by the abolition of Education Boards. It would certainly be better to abolish the Boards than reduce them to impotence, as the Department has been so long trying to do, and it is quite likely that the functions which the Boards now perform could be as well carried out by district councils. But since it is a disgrace to the Department that the service should have drifted into such extravagances, it is impossible to feel easy about the transfer of all authority, and all direct control, to the hands of those who are primarily responsible for the state of things the Report see'rs to redress. If the Boards must go. and so many of those who have been doing what is now considered to f>>.* unnecessary work, there should be ;i Ministerial overhaul of the administr-j----tive staff at Departmental headquarters, not only because of the failures of the past, but in preparation for the vastly greater responsibilities of the immediate future. And with regard to such items as the abolition of agricultural instruction, while it cannot be denied that there has been duplication and waste, it is not certain that the remedy ; s to have no instruction at all. The mere. fact that the agricultural clubs commended by the Committee have come out of the schools and hot out of the Agricultural Department suggests, if it does not prove, that this particular economy might be more usefully made in another field. But the two most disturbing economies, unless they are balanced to some extent at least by transfers to scholarship funds, ore the proposed complete suspension of University bursaries and travelling allowances for post-primary scholars from country districts. Although there has been shameful waste under both thesa heads for many years, it ought to impossible to end that without ending everything.