§ MR. R. H. PAGETasked the Vice President of the Council, Whether, seeing that eighteen out of twenty parishes composing the Wells Union (including a thickly populated parish of an urban character) have adopted, under the sanction of the Education Department, the 4th Standard as the Standard for exemption from school attendance, and, seeing that the purely agricultural parish of Meare has experienced great inconvenience from the adoption of a higher Standard, he will favourably consider an application from that parish to place its Standard of exemption on a common footing with a large majority of the parishes of its union?
§ MR. MUNDELLASir, there are 16 parishes in the Wells Union, four of which are under boards and the rest under school attendance committees. Three out of four boards, of which Meare is one, have the 5th Standard for total exemption; the remaining parishes have the 4th. The bye-laws in Meare were 227 passed in 1877; and, if the attendance of the children had been regularly enforced, they would have had no difficulty in passing the 5th Standard by the time that they were fit for labour. It would be quite impossible, in a case such as this, to lower the Standard fixed so long ago, and that by the school board itself. There is, no doubt, inconvenience attending inequality of Standards; but the proper remedy, in the interests of the children and of the schools, is to level up, and not to level down. Children under 10 years of age are passing the 4th Standard in increasing numbers every year; and complaints are coming in from the clergy, school managers, and teachers, which are confirmed by our own Inspectors, that, owing to the low Standards adopted by so many school attendance committees, children are leaving school earlier than heretofore, and that the schools and the children are suffering in consequence.