BOARDING SCHOOLS AND THE L;C:C.
Sta,—I should be the last, for reasons which Mr. Hayward will recognise, to deny that the L.C.C. made a good start towards fulfilling its obligations under the Education Act, 1944, in regard to boarding education. But provision for 200 children is only a start, and the question is whether Mr. Hayward and his friends, by their decisions last spring, did rot apply a serious brake to progia:ss which already has had injurious results and will continue to do so unless they alter their attitude.
Mr. Hayward informs you that " the Council . . . decided to begin by giving priority to those children for whom a boarding school educa- tion would obviously be more beneficial." This is a misrepresentation which goes to the root of the controversy. No one would object to priorities, but what the L.C.C. has done is to give to certain selected categories the sole privilege of a hoarding education to the complete and arbitrary exclusion of any child not falling within them, even after the needs of those categories had been met as far as possible. To describe this as " giving priority " is to mislead your readers on the central issue under discussion.
Eighty places, which could not be filled from the selected categories, have been rejected in preference to offering them to children outside those categories. Somewhere in London there are eighty children who might have been embarking next month for a new realm of opportunity, had not Mr. Hayward and his colleagues denied them. That is the simple charge, and Mr. Hayward has made no attempt to answer it.—Yours
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