INDUSTRIAL TRAINING AFTER SCHOOL LETTERS TO
THE EDITOR
a constant reader of your paper for many years, I have followed with interest the increased concern shown by your contributors and .correspondents in the education of juveniles in the years immediately following the school-leaving age of 14. Our leaders are at one in stressing the vital need of doing all possible for young people of this age.
The following is a concrete instance of how the authorities immediately concerned with this problem are dealing with it The firm of which I em director have established, in a mining community 14 miles from Nottingham, a small factory with the specific purpose of training girls leaving school to become skilled operatives in the light clothing industry. This has been well supported by the schools in the neighbourhood, with the result that about 5o per cent. of the labour force in our main Nottingham factory is comprised either of girls under 16 drafted in from the training school when a suitable standard of proficiency has been attained, or of girls of a similar age who live locally and have been trained since. leaving school in our main factory. In common with all other nucleus firms in our branch of the trade, our firm has been granted an approved labour force beyond which we must not expand, and all surplus 'labour is drafted into other work in order to feed the war industries. This is reasonable, and we should not dream of complaining. What strikes us as unreasonable, however, is that in fixing the approved labour force no, account is taken of juvenile training schemes such as ours, beyond allowing us to ignore, for purposes of computation, girls who have been with us less than six months. In order to bring our labour force down to the statutory figure, the authorities are drawing upon our recently trained labour, and have been telling our fifteen-year-old employees that they have got to leave us. They then present them with a choice of alternative jobs to go to. The result, of course, is that the juvenile concerned is uprooted from the surroundings she is used to and is sent out to face the unknown ordeal of a fresh situation ; and all this at an age when it is surely most important that a girl should be allowed to continue undisturbed in the career and company of her own and her parents' choice. It would appear, therefore, that the-effect of the present regulations, no doubt unintended, is to discriminate against industrial training as applying to working-class children,' as obviously children of parents in different circumstances would still be at schOol at 15, and would, of course, be left there without interference.
My firm have had to discontinue the engagement of juveniles and the training centre in the mining community is to be closed.
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