Education
Waiting for the Chopper
By a HEAD TEACHER COME day I am going to receive a visit from the local inspector or, if I am especially privileged, from the Director of Education him- self. It will be a short visit. I shall be told very respectfully that my school will have to be closed, as there seems to be,no prospect of the number on roll, ever increasing sufficiently to make it an economic proposition again.
As schools go, it is relatively new—late 1920s. It is a fine, well-built structure with an enormous playground. We have access to good playing fields, though we have to travel to them and share them with other schools.• We have a fine, loyal staff. Our discipline is good. We get quite a number of nice letters from parents, when their children leave. To me it is the finest school I have ever worked in. It is a good secon- dary school, even if it is an underpopulated one.
Why then must it inevitably go? The answer lies in the fact that house-building in this district, as in so many others, has never been related to the schools available.
When this school was built, it was intended to accommodate some 800 boys and girls. It never did. By the time the school was opened some of the overcrowded streets in the district had been knocked down. The population of the catchment area had started to drift off to other parts of the town and to districts outside the town, where there were no schools. The situation was saved in the 1930s by the building of a new council housing estate not far from our school. Old-timers• on the staff tell me that atone time almost half the children on our roll came from that estate. Now we get very few indeed from there, for the residents are largely elderly couples whose children have grown up.
The chopper nearly fell in 1946, when numbers had dropped to under 200. The situation was saved, because the birth rate in the area had risen sharply in the late 1930s after the worst of the depression had passed. Just after the war new housing estates began to arise in the adjoining county area. There, was no school for the children to go to. So they came to us. The post-war bulge drove our numbers up sharply again. When I arrived as head, the school looked to have an assured future.
In fact everyone was living in a fool's paradise. The local birth rate had been very low in the years following the bulge, and, to make matters Worse, cur council had set its face against private enterprise building. The vacant building land in our area was left. The speculative builder found land to build on outside the town bound- aries. There planning permission for building was easier to obtain, as the local authorities saw that new houses meant an increased rateable value. A steady flow of population from our town moved out.
At first the children stayed with us. There were no schools in the new areas where they had gone to. Then all round the town the county authority built new schools. These are now nearly bursting. One built for 400 is squeezing in 600, yet, only one and a half miles away, we have some 300 vacant places. The county authority is being forced to lay out large sums on accommodation for these children, who could easily attend our school, if transport were laid on. Unfortunately the county people see no point in paying for their children to be educated in another authority's schools.
Then to give us' the final coup de grace came the second stage of the clearance programme.
Already the pre-war part of our area looked as if a bomb had hit it. Street after street had been knocked down and the sites left unoccupied, although the whole area had drains, sewers and shops. The inhabitants were shifted to housing estates without schools at the other end of the town. Of course new schools have had to be built there as a panic measure in the last ten years. The rolls of these schools are now falling, as the population there is getting older.
Instead of filling in the empty spaces on our side of the town,- the rest of the overcrowded streets have been cleared. The families have been moved to fresh housing estates in a different part of the town. These estates, of course, lack sufficient schools. Such as there are are filled to overflowing. The councillors in the wards concerned are yelling for additional school places to be built in their part of the town.
The effect on us has been disastrous. Five years ago in September we admitted 130, four years ago one hundred, three years ago seventy- five, two years ago sixty-two and last September fifty-five. This year I expect to admit thirty-eight. As numbers fall, staff arc forcibly removed. As specialists leave they are not replaced. Our teachers are becoming 'Jacks of all trades.' It looks as if next year in his spare time the metalwork master will have to take two or three music lessons. The hard fact, obvious to me at any rate, is that as a school we are redundant. All the capital expenditure represented by our fine buildings has been wasted. All the work that has gone into building up the fine traditions of the school has been wasted, for sooner or later the chopper must fall. And it need never have happened, had the building of houses been related to the availability of schools and if the planners had had the sense to rebuild derelict areas.
The one satisfaction • we have is that in ten or fifteen years' time the schools which arc bursting at the seams now will, like us, be wait- ing for the chopper. What is so often forgotten is that new estates, largely populated by the young, inexorably find themselves in two or three decades with an ageing population.
Surely one answer is to use the under-used buildings now, by disregarding administra- tive boundaries and by transporting children to the' buildings where there is room. For there is no sense in building a school costing perhaps £300,000 to £500,000 for an estate which in twenty years' time will have half the child. population it has today, when perhaps two miles away under a neighbouring authority there is a well-equipped but under-used school like mine, which is dying because the areas which once filled it have disappeared or become streets of the aged.
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