EDUCATION IN LEICESTER 83 
and secondary schools. Every child in the former is inspected three 
times during school life. There are three dental clinics, an eye clinic, 
an operative clinic with twelve beds for tonsils, adenoids and mastoids 
and an operative clinic for crippling. For many years X-ray treatment 
has been provided. It is worth noting perhaps that the records of school 
medical officers show that since 1902 there has been an average increase 
in height of the Leicester boys of 1 in., girls, 14 in., and an average 
increase in weight of boys by 6 lb., girls 8 lb. 
During the last term of an elementary school child’s life he is visited 
at the schools by the Committee’s employment officers and advised as 
to the vacancies that have been notified by employers, and his own 
qualification for filling them. At the age of 16, when he becomes eligible 
for unemployment benefit, he must attend an evening institute as a 
condition of getting this benefit. 
It has been stated already that one result of the general examination 
was to show the extraordinary diversity of academic attainment among 
elementary school children—it also showed how many there were qualified 
to profit by the conventional type of secondary education in comparison 
with the number of places in secondary schools available. ‘The Education 
Committee, in 1919, immediately took steps to remedy this—the provision 
of intermediate schools has been referred to above,—by providing a 
Secondary Boys’ School and two Secondary Girls’ Schools, one (the 
Collegiate) by purchase from a private owner. ‘There were then 3,500 
places available. But the Committee were not satisfied that the con- 
ventional secondary curriculum was adapted to provide a right form of 
secondary education for all of ability to profit by staying at school till 
at least 16. In consequence they opened a new type of school—the 
Gateway School for Boys,—in which those of marked ability but with 
no special interest in acadeinical subjects could be educated till 16 years 
of age at least. They built, moreover, a ‘ Gateway School’ for Girls 
in the Newarke, but for reasons of economy. transferred the Newarke 
Girls’ School there and used the old Newarke School buildings in part 
for administrative offices. 
But it was not only in respect of full-time education that the post-war 
enthusiasm displayed itself; each year the number of those attending 
the evening schools, particularly students over 18, increased. The 
evening classes at the Technical and Art School—now the Colleges of 
Art and Technology,—grew till they more than filled the premises of a 
large Secondary School as well as that of the College which had already 
been increased by an additional wing in 1898. It was necessary to add 
another wing, and even then the premises were not big enough—the 
completion of the building is only held over until the present straightened 
circumstances are passed. 
The 1918 Act made it incumbent on the Authority to make such 
provision that no boy or girl should be deprived of any form of education 
by which he or she could profit. ‘There was no University or University 
College in the immediate neighbourhood : Leicester set out immediately 
to develop one of her own. The University College was registered as 
a company in 1921; a site had been presented and a considerable 
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