SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 December 1938, Page 5

SECONDARY SCHOOLS

PROPOSALS IN BRITAIN REPORT OF CONSULTATIVE COMMITTEE. DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENTIFIC INSTRUCTION. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 10.50 a.m.) < RUGBY, December 29. In the report of an inquiry which has been proceeding for five years, a consultative committee expresses the view that secondary education in the past has been too exclusively academic. It recommends a new type of school to oe called a “technical high school,” to take selected boys at eleven and provide a five years’ course. In the first two years the curriculum would be similar to that of other secondary schools, and later the course would follow more modern lines, with science as its central feature.

A new type of internal examination, with a leaving certificate to bo taken at sixteen, is suggested. The technical schools are to be developed out of the present junior technical schools in building and engineering and they will be equivalent in status to grammar schools. The committee considers that grammar schools should continue as hitherto to provide an education mainly for boys and girls likely to go to a university, and urges that greater freedom be allowed schools in shaping their curriculum. Suggestions for ensuring that pupils shall be allowed to develop their individual tastes and capacities are made and the committee stresses the importance of good teaching of spoken and written English as a central feature of the curriculum in these schools.

Looking beyond these immediate proposals, the committee favours a

single national system of schools for pupils between the ages of eleven and sixteen. In this system there would be grammar . schools, technical high schools, modern selective schools and senior schools. The committee thinks chat ultimately all these types should be under one secondary code.