L.—EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE 223 
Moreover, and apart from certain powers which the councils exercised 
under the Technical Instruction Acts, to which I shall refer again, the 
only previously established education authorities in the county areas were 
the school boards, which had been let in under Mr. Forster’s Act where 
the voluntary schools were unable to supply sufficient elementary educa- 
tion. These authorities were scattered irregularly in pockets, usually 
small, over the county areas. Their suppression was locally unpopular. 
Their members, who generally represented what there was of enlightened 
educational opinion in their several localities, had to be conciliated, for 
they were inclined to go into opposition to the new county authority, and 
beyond that, the County Education Committee and its officers had a 
sufficiently heavy task in bringing home to the rate-payers that they were 
now members of a large education area, and in stimulating and focussing 
appreciation of the educational needs of the area as a whole. 
An administrative area for education purposes is not created merely 
by tying together a number of smaller education authorities, or even by 
clothing an authority existing for other purposes with educational powers. 
For effective functioning a common outlook has to be achieved and the 
will to organise and work together for common purposes must be evoked. 
It is a slow process which cannot yet be said to be fully accomplished, 
certainly not in many areas as regards education beyond the secondary 
stage. ‘This weak position in which the counties were in contrast to the 
county boroughs, was in part reponsible for a serious departure in the 
Act from the principle that education is one and that educational adminis- 
tration must be single. I refer, of course, to the Part III authorities 
responsible for elementary education only. Of these there are about 
one hundred and seventy boroughs and urban districts—islands for the 
most part in the areas of the sixty-two English and Welsh counties, and 
containing not quite a third of the total county populations—islands of 
all sorts and sizes from little towns of 9,000 and 10,000 to the urban areas 
round London with populations nearing the second hundred thousand. 
Many of them are beyond doubt very efficient within their statutory 
limitations. ‘They have a civic pride in their schools which is not com- 
mon in the county areas. On the other hand, most of them are too small 
to form satisfactory administrative units even for elementary education, 
and generally they are a clog on the development of the national system. 
The central authority cannot forget them in framing its regulations and 
settling its administrative precedents, yet reasonable treatment for Little 
Pedlington may be merely annoying when meted out to a large county or 
county borough. They cut across county schemes of organisation, and 
while it is only fair to admit that they desire as a whole to co-operate, they 
complicate, and therefore add to the expense of administration. More- 
over, officers and teachers tend to move to the larger areas, and in the 
long run the quality of the local education service is injuriously affected. 
_ But the principal reason for removing the anomaly of the Part III 
authority is that with its existence is bound up the preservation of the 
Statutory distinction between elementary and higher education. It was 
inevitable that, on the transfer of organised elementary education from the 
school boards to the new local authorities, the whole apparatus of parlia- 
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