L.—EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE 227 
expenditure and the Board is a department of the Ministry of Health, 
where the block grant system obtains. Can you even imagine the Board 
of Education nowadays risking any such rebuke ? 
The task to which the new local authorities of 1902 were principally 
called was the development and organisation of an adequate system of 
secondary education. It was not a virgin field of which they took posses- 
sion. ‘There were the endowed grammar schools, mostly of pre-Reforma- 
tion foundation, individually independent, usually small and struggling 
to make ends meet on very inadequate resources, some of them too dis- 
heartened’ even to struggle—mere class alternatives to the ordinary 
elementary school. ‘There were the schools of the companies, and of the 
religious bodies, not quite so hard pressed, frequently with ends to serve 
other than those which a public system must ensure. There were the 
organised science schools—the categories are not mutually exclusive, 
taking grants from the old Science and Art Department for the teaching 
of specific subjects. ‘There were the centres for the training and education 
of pupil teachers provided by the old School Boards, and there were the 
private schools, good and bad, demanding to be taken into account. 
Rightly indeed were the authorities enjoined to a careful consideration 
of the needs of their area before attempting to bring order into this 
chaos. 
The story of the last thirty years in secondary education is absorbing for 
those of us who lived in it. By strenuous and persistent effort the local 
authorities have transformed the face of this department of national 
education in a generation. It would be difficult to instance another 
movement which achieved as much in as short a time and with so little of 
that wasteful effervescence which characterises and sometimes mars great 
outbursts of activity on a national scale. The story cannot be told now ; 
I can do no more here than mark the line and pace of the development by 
way of giving substance to the high claim I have made for the authorities. 
The Board of Education lost no time in giving a lead. Local authori- 
ties might be sceptical about the need for more secondary schools, but they 
knew that at least the elementary schools must be staffed and that they 
had to find the teachers. In 1903 new Regulations for the Instruction 
and Training of Pupil Teachers were issued, in which it was indicated that 
up to sixteen years of age the intending pupil teacher should be educated 
in a secondary school. That meant that every boy or girl in the public 
secondary schools of some areas would be needed for the teaching pro- 
fession, and the question of increasing facilities was at once brought out 
of the realm of theory. 
A year later came the first Regulations for Secondary Schools, with a 
definition of the term, very general in form, which has not yet been super- 
seded. In the regulations the length of the course, the subjects of study, 
even the minimum of time to be devoted to each subject, were all pre- 
cisely stated. You will look in vain for this last requirement in the 
regulations of to-day. 
Of these two sets of regulations it can, I think, be said that, while in 
form they were prescriptive, laying down conditions which must be 
complied with if the Parliamentary grant was to be taken, the underlying 
