PRIMARY SCHOOLS
SIR,—As a recently retired Head of a Grammar School Preparatory Department, may I reply to Miss Wilmshurst's very practical letter with the records of some twenty-five years' research work on the subject of Primary School numbers? The work of the children admitted to the middle and upper part of the schoo from the over-large classes of Elementary Schools and the badly graded classes under untrained teachers in the uninspected Private Schools show the unmistakable drift that is going on therein. Yet, with 35 per cent, admitted to the enabling conditions as beginncrs in the Preparatory Department (twenty- five to a teacher), 35 per cent. from Elementary Schools and 30 per cent. from Private Schools, 96.7 per cent, have achieved Secondary Education over a period of twenty-seven years, following through to universities in England, France and U.S.A., together with Secondary, Technical, Agricultural, Domestic Science and Physical Training and Art Colleges. The children were drawn from a great variety of home circumstances, and are following a great variety of callings.
Such schools, with the individual methods and project activities now being demanded as if they were something new, offer the tangible solution to the "Slum conditions of mental training" in the State-aided Primary Schools, which cannot avoid the drift in character training and the shallowness of academic training that are so justly complained of. By extending instead of closing such Preparatory Schools, allying with them children from 'he over-large classes of the State Primary Schools, we should at once have begun a reduction in class numbers and a levelling up from the foundations. As it is, such departments are to be closed under the very Education Act whose aims they have made alive, namely, Secondary Eddcation for all who can benefit (96 per cent.),
equal opportunities for all (and the enabling conditions for seizing them, with proof that they have been seized), happiness in achieving, and levelling up as a result of tilt. process (both academic and social).
Furthering my researches in the Home Counties recently, I find modern teachers and students depressed at the inadequacy of the primary reform, " ancient " teachers apathetic, parent-teachers indignant, while the type of teachers we airs at refuse to abandon their principles of education in primary schools without the enabling conditions, yet these they would serve in preference to a privileged class who are already benefiting by them.
It is to our foundations that we must look for reform, to better liaison work between Inspectors, L.E.A.s, Educational Associations and schools, and until they are forthcoming for the primaries, so long will our senior education prove disappointing and "equal opportunities for all " fail to be seized. The teachers are not lacking for the primaries. They are drifting away from a national scheme which is crying for their principles and practices to Independent Schools which enable the practising of these principles. Public opinion is being roused for these Primary children where L.E.A. enterprise fails. Such opinion needs enlightenment as to how and why the needs should be met, now, at
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