§ MR. WHITEHEAD (Essex, S.E.)I beg to ask the President of the Board of Education whether his attention has been drawn to the fact that when individual children are kept away from an elementary school by order of the medical officer of health their absence, by reducing the average attendance, reduces the Parliamentary grant; whether he is aware that reduction under such circumstances operates hardly upon poor districts, and discourages proper precautions against the spreading of disease; and whether steps can be taken to assimilate the administration of elementary schools in this particular to that prevailing in secondary schools, where no loss of Parliamentary grant is sustained through absence caused by illness.
§ MR. LOUGHThe absence of individual children, whatever be the cause, necessarily reduces the average attendance of the school, but I do not think any serious loss of grant results from exclusion under medical authority; for example, the exclusion of forty children for a week would only involve a loss of about £2 to the local education authority. The method of computing average attendance will, of course, be one of the questions demanding careful consideration in connection with any scheme for reorganising the system of grants, but I have grave doubts whether the system at present in force in secondary schools could be applied without very considerable modifications to elementary schools.