THE TEXT OF THE MEASURE, AS SUBMITTED.

Be it enacted by the King's Most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords, spiritual and temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:

1. The education act, 1902 (in this act referred to as the principal act), shall, so far as applicable, and subject to modifications made by this act, apply to London. 2. The education committee of the local education authority shall be constituted in manner provided by the first schedule to this act.

3. (1) The council of each metropolitan borough shall be the managers of all public elementary schools provided by the local education authority within their borough, and subject to any general directions given by the local education authority and to the power of that authority to determine the number, qualifications, and salaries of teachers, shall exercise and perform the powers and duties of management as respects those schools (including the power of appointing and dismissing teachers in those schools and the custody of the buildings).

If any question arises whether any power may be exercised or any duty is to be performed by the council of a metropolitan borough as a matter of management under this section, that question shall be determined by the board of education, and if at any time the local education authority satisfy the board of education that the council of any metropolitan borough have failed properly to exercise or perform their powers and duties under this section, the board may, by order, enable the local education authority to take over from the council those powers and duties for such time and subject to such conditions or exceptions as the board determine.

(2) The site of any new public elementary school to be provided by the local education authority being a site within the area, which in the opinion of the local education authority will be served by the new school, shall (subject to compliance with such conditions as may be made by that authority with respect to the amount available for the purchase of the site) be selected by the council of the metropolitan borough in which the area is situated, or, if that area is comprised in more than one metropolitan borough, by the councils of those boroughs jointly.

(3) The council of a metropolitan borough may, if they think fit, exercise any of their powers under this section, and also any powers which may be delegated to them by the local education authority under the principal act, or which they have as minor local authority under that act, through a committee or committees appointed by them, consisting either wholly or partly of members of the council.

4. (1) The modifications of the principal act set out in the second schedule to this act shall have effect for the purposes of this act.

(2) The expression metropolitan borough" in this act shall include the city, and the expression "council of a metropolitan borough" shail include the common council.

5. (1) This act shall come into operation on the appointed day, and the appointed day shall be the 1st day of May, 1904, or such other day, not being more than twelve months later, as the board of education may appoint, and different days may be appointed for different purposes and for different provisions of this act.

(2) In addition to the repeals effected by the principal act, the acts mentioned in the third schedule to this act shall be repealed to the extent specified in the third column of that schedule.

(3) This act may be cited as the education (London) act, 1903, and the education acts, 1870 to 1902, and this act may be cited as the education acts, 1870 to 1903.

FIRST SCHEDULE.

CONSTITUTION OF EDUCATION COMMITTEE.

1. The education committee shall as ordinarily constituted consist of 92 members, of whom 36 shall be persons who are members of the local education authority, appointed by that authority; 31 shall be persons who are members of the councils of metropolitan boroughs, appointed by those councils, the common council and the council of the city of Westminster each appointing 2 members, and each of the other metropolitan boroughs appointing 1 member; and 25 shall be appointed by the local education authority in accordance with a scheme made by that authority and approved by the board of education.

The scheme shall provide for the appointment of those members in accordance with paragraphs (b) and (c) of subsection 3 of section 17 of the principal act, and subsections 6 and 7 of section 17 and section 21 of that act (which relate to the making of schemes) shall apply with respect to any such scheme as they apply with respect to a scheme for the constitution of the whole education committee. 2. On the first education committee there shall be 5 supernumerary members, selected by the local education authority from among the members of the London school board; but those supernumerary members shall cease to hold office on the expiration of a period of five years from the date of the constitution of the first education committee, and any vacancy in their number occurring by death, resignation, or otherwise shall not be filled up.

The two remaining schedules of the bill not being pertinent to the present consideration, are here omitted.

The chief objections to the bill were very forcibly presented in the House of Commons by Doctor Macnamara and Mr. Bryce in the speeches here cited:

Doctor MACNAMARA said that the single question with which he proposed to deal was that of the constitution of the education authority, a subject on which a number of his honorable friends opposite had told him that they had an absolutely open mind. To them he especially directed his arguments. He repeated what he said last year-that there was nothing essentially antidemocratic in giving the full and complete control of education to a municipal council wherever that was physically possible, as it might be, say, in a town of 10,000 people; but in the case of the larger urban areas educational work was so large and complicated that this was not physically possible. The Government attempted it last year, and they had at once to call in a large number of outside persons not responsible to the ratepayers. At a very early stage of the experiment this further thing happened: It was found that the members of a town council could not give the time which the work of the education committee required, and that the work fell largely into the hands of the other members of the committee.

The stupendousness of the London problem.-As a member of the London school board he wished to draw attention to the stupendous work of which that board had charge. The board consisted of 55 members, and it had 7 standing committees and 32 subcommittees. Last year the members were called to no fewer than 706 meetings of one sort or another. The board had control of over 1,400 schoolboard departments; it had 536,000 children to educate; it had 13,519 teachers to supervise. In addition, the board had 10 special schools for the blind, 18 for the deaf, 60 for the mentally defective, 4 for the physically defective, 2 industrial schools, 3 day industrial schools, 2 truant schools, and 12 pupil teachers' centers. It was obvious that the 55 members of the board could not give direct attention to all that work. They had been obliged to call into being an immense scheme of local management. They had 251 groups of local managers, comprising over 2,000 persons, who were in direct touch with the schools. Then there was the work of the voluntary schools, with 1,500 departments and 220,000 children, which had to be taken over, as well as duties in connection with higher education. Altogether the education of London involved 2,000 separate institutions, 20,000 teachers, the instruction of 1,000,000 pupils, and a public expenditure of four millions of money a year. That was a piece of work as big as the whole of the present work of the London county council, and equal, or very nearly equal, to the education of Scotland, and three times the education of Wales.

If the proposal to make the county council the education authority were genuine, it was a proposal to double its work. But Lord Salisbury not long ago said that the county council had already too much to do, and that its members were suffering from megalomania. If the Government proposed to double the work of the council, who were the megalomaniacs? Fourteen members of the council had been detached to join the water board; it was proposed to detach 8 under the port of London bill; 6 were detached for the Thames conservancy, and 2 for the Lee conservancy. Now 36 more were to be detached. There was a total of 66, or more than half of the number of elected members of the county council. In fact, if this proposal were real, the Government would, in killing the school board, be also wrecking the county council. If, on the other hand, the proposal were not real, the scheme was to set up a kind of water board, protected from public censure and public criticism because it happened to have over its portals the magic letters L. C. C. He suggested that the 36 county councilors, having all their other duties to attend to, would not be able to attend to the work of the education ED 190316

committee. That work would therefore fall into the hands of the 31 borough councilors and the 30 outsiders. That was to say, in lieu of a body directly elected and responsible to the ratepayers, they would have a fortuitous concourse of heterogeneous atoms. From the educational point of view this was a thoroughly bad scheme, and it ought never to have been submitted to the House. It would not only mean bad administration, but that the apathy which London now suffered from would become more and more abysmal as time went on.

The scheme was so bad, in his opinion, that they could not tinker with it. The proposal that the borough councils should select sites for schools was perfectly ludicrous. He would not say that there would be any jobbery, although he had his own opinion about that, but he was quite sure that the borough councilors would not select the best sites educationally. He was chairman of the accommodation committee of the school board, and he had had experience, as that House had had experience, of what a borough council was likely to do in these cases. In the session before last the Stepney borough council came forward and protested against a certain site which the school board had selected in their area, and the alternative site suggested by the borough council was an abominably bad one for a school, with no air or light and in touch with a railway station through which hundreds of trains ran daily. They wanted the school built there because it was an insanitary area which had to be cleared, and thought they would kill two birds with one stone. The borough councils would not select the best sites; they would have other considerations besides educational considerations in mind. Furthermore, these councils, with heavy horough rates already in existence, would not adopt the policy of the school board of securing sites early to meet future requirements; and, as it took four or five years to build a school, he foresaw that hundreds and thousands of children, owing to the lack of foresight and initiative of these small local bodies, would not have any school at all.

Borough councils and the teachers.-Then there was the provision that the borough councils should have a complete veto over the appointment and dismissal of teachers. He did not suggest that there would be any jobbery, but there would be a great deal of local influence. At the present time one of the greatest difficulties a great central body like the school board had was to keep the teaching-staff committee free from attempts at local and personal influence. He could imagine that many of the teachers hereafter would be relatives of members of the borough councils, and he was perfectly sure that one of the results of this provision would be to shut the teacherships of London into water-tight compartments or districts. If this bill ever got to a second reading, which he very much doubted, then these two provisions would have to be fundamentally altered. The honorable member poured scorn on a directly elected board of education, but he would suggest to the Government to note the words of one of its shrewdest and most business-like members, Lord Balfour, at Glasgow, the other day. Having heard rumors of an education bill for Scotland on the lines of the English bill, Lord Balfour said: "Perhaps he ought to say, to allay some misrepresentation which had been used, that he himself did not believe, so far as Scotland was concerned, in any system which had not its basis in direct popular election." Surely what was sauce for the Scottish goose ought to be sance for the London gander. He appealed to the Government to accept a scheme like that which he had proposed, and which had received the support of the London school board by 31 votes to 15, the majority including several moderates. That scheme provided for the election of one member directly from each of the 58 county council areas, multiplicity of elections being avoided by holding them on the same day. Then, in order to provide for the representation of minorities and for dealing adequately with higher education, he proposed that there should be a margin of cooptation after the ad hoc election had taken place. The scheme of direct election had the support not only of the school board but of the borough councils of Battersea, Camberwell, Fulham, Lambeth, Poplar, Woolwich, Southwark, and Wandsworth, the last of which had 67 moderate members as against 3 progressives. He appealed both to the secretary of the board of education and to the prime minister to maintain the ad hoc principle, without which public concern could not be kept alive, and unless public interest were engaged all schemes of education must prove arid and fruitless. (Schoolmaster, Apr. 11, 1903.)

SPEECH OF MR. BRYCE, M. P., IN OPPOSITION TO THE BILL.

The bill [Mr. Bryce said] presented itself to them under two aspects. It incorporated by its first clause, subject to modifications which were extremely difficult to follow and would cause the greatest possible trouble in committee, the provisions of the act of last year and applied them to London. It created a new authority

for London, purporting to appoint it on the lines of last year's act, but making some important variations, which, so far as he could see, were variations for the worse. On the first aspect he had but a few words to say. The act of 1902 was to be applied to a population of four and a half millions, a seventh of the whole popnlation of England and a half of what the whole population was a century ago. Therefore the application of the principles of the education act of 1902 to London must be a matter of grave concern. That act destroyed, or at any rate postponed, the prospect of having a real organic and harmonious system of national education. It consolidated and consecrated sectarianism. It established for the first time religious tests in public elementary schools. It refused to the people the right to manage schools which as ratepayers they were called upon to support. The opposition could not see these dangerous principles-principles so opposed to popular government-applied to London without renewing their protest against them. The questions raised by the act of last year were not settled; they awaited the deliverance of the country; and the country would have to express its mind upon them at the next general election. As to the present bill, there had been a remarkable demonstration of disapproval of its provisions with regard to the borough councils from the ministerial side of the House. Member after member had risen complaining of these provisions, saying either that the powers of the borough councils ought to be less, that they ought to be taken out of the education committee, or that the representation of the county council on the committee ought to be larger. The House really was not debating the bill before it. The prime minister had made yesterday a vague and, as usual, a tactful speech. The right honorable gentleman endeavored to minimize the bill, to confine it to certain leading principles; and he expressed those leading principles in such a way as to make it possible for him at a later stage to say that the present provisions of the bill with regard to the constitution of the education committee and the arrangements for the management of the schools were not part of its essentials. But neither the right honorable gentleman nor the Parliamentary secretary to the education board told the House what it was intended to substitute for these provisions. Therefore he was obliged to deal with the bill as it stood. He had read with positive bewilderment the new education authority it proposed to constitute for London. The school-board system had been working well for thirty-three years. No charge whatever had been brought against the efficiency, the zeal, or the wisdom of the school board. It was a system that had obtained the approval of the people. That system was now to be overthrown, and in its place was to be set up a system so confused that it was hard through the mists to discern even its outlines. It seemed to him to be an inextricable mixture of county council, education committee, borough council, boroughcouncil committee, voluntary managers, and the board of education-authorities which were continually crossing and recrossing each other and which were so interlaced that it was hard to conceive how it could ever work. It combined the maximum of complexity with the minimum of cohesion. He desired an explanation of the singular policy which the Government had followed. If their object was, as in the bill of last year, to throw the voluntary schools on the rates, there was nothing in the world to prevent the Government from taking the school board as it stood and throwing upon it the duty of supporting the voluntary schools exactly in the same way as the board schools. The fact was, the Government had another pet aversion in the school board as they had in the county council. From this determination to get rid of the school board the Government had introduced this clumsy and chaotic scheme, which, in addition to the faults of the bill of last year, had faults of its own. Those faults were reducible to three. The bill did not recognize the unity of London, it did not recognize popular control, and it did nothing for efficiency and economy. In dealing with the first of these propositions he denied the right of the borough councils to the place they were given in the scheme. What had been the action of the county council itself? It was not wanting in activity, energy, and self-confidence; yet the previous day the council by a majority of four to one expressed its opinion that it was not able and had not the time and capacity to undertake the additional work of London education. It had also expressed the opinion that the work of education ought to be given to a body directly elected for that purpose. He also regretted the practical exclusion of women from the work of education on the new bodies and showed that the borough councils were not suitable bodies to do the work of the existing school managers, who had a knowledge of the needs of schools, were on the spot, and were familiar with the everyday work of each school. When he thought of what the actual management of a school was, he was sometimes inclined to ask the first lord of the treasury whether he was not really living in a world of phantoms. There was a great school of philosophers who adopted the name of nominalists, and he thought the right honorable gentleman might be described as a nominalist, who lived in a

world of names and talked of decentralization, delegation, management, and so on as if they represented things when they were only so many names-so many abstractions which played hither and thither across the horizon of the right honorable gentleman's mind, but which did not correspond to the actual concrete facts of the case. If the right honorable gentleman had realized what were the actual facts, he thought he would not have proposed to make the borough councils managers of the schools. Under this bill the local education authority would have less control over the provided [i. e., public] than over the nonprovided [i. e., private] schools, an extraordinary anomaly for which no argument had been advanced. The really vital power to appoint and dismiss teachers ought to have been left in the hands of the central authority. Then the question of sites was one which caght to be considered in the interests not of a particular locality, but of the whole area which the school was to serve, and therefore it was not a question for a borough council to determine. The London school board had worked for years under a management code which had been hammered into a very useful and workable document, but there was no certainty that that would be adopted by the borough councils. He was not conscious of having been prejudiced by any partisan feeling. He recognized one great benefit which the bill would bestow, by giving a wider power of rating for the purposes of higher education. He hoped that power would be used not only for technical and secondary but also for higher education, and believed it would be for the benefit of all classes in London that university education should be more accessible to the poorer classes. But he should indeed be despondent in regard to the future of education in London if he did not feel sure that the essential defects of the scheme before them were such that it could not possibly stand. He hoped that they would soon be called to make a serious effort in a very different spirit from that displayed by the Government to render the education of London, both higher and elementary, worthy of the population and resources of the capital of the British Empire. (Cited from The Schoolmaster, May 2, 1903.)

Among other particulars emphasized by members of Parliament in opposition to the bill, the following deserve to be noted. From speech of Mr. Sydney Buxton, M. P., and member of London board:

Look at the constitution of the proposed education committee. There would be on it 36 persons by direct election, 31 persons who would be there by secondary election, elected by the borough councils. Not one of 66 persons on the committee could be a woman. As a colleague of nine women on the London school board he could testify to the admirable work and devoted service rendered by those ladies. Of the 30 coopted members, not one of them was elected at all in behalf of the ratepayers. He had only one comment to make on this committee-its birth killed it.

The forceful combinations against the bill were thus summed up by Mr. Toxall, M. P.:

The bill was condemned not only by the Liberal but by the Unionist press, he might say, generally, by the whole press of London and by nearly half the borough councils. The bishop of Rochester, who was friendly to the act of last year, said that from the side of the schools and the children he was most apprehensive of the bill. The secondary and elementary school-teachers, the school-attendance officers, the Women's Local Government Society, and others connected with London education had also condemned the provisions of the bill, which were not pleasing either to the London school board, the technical education board, or the clergy. The bill as it stood was not a machinery measure. The right honorable gentle- man, the member for Cambridge University, had told the House that the bill was the logical successor of the act of last year; but he contended that there was no parallel between the provisions made for a city like Manchester last year and the provisions to be made for London. A plan of machinery, a system of government, a method of arrangement that might be practicable in a city of half a million people was totally impracticable in a city of 5,000,000 people. The most suitable departure from the plan of last year was to set up in London a special authority for London, elected directly for education, and for that purpose only. That plan had been rejected by the Government for political reasons, political prepossessions, and party prejudice. He regretted that a dislike for the existing school board, a dislike for direct election, a predilection for the borough councils, and other considerations of that kind should have produced a bill which was inadequate and unsuited to the conditions and needs of London, which could only be temporary, and must in the long run be replaced by a measure setting up an authority for