§ I now come to education. The general principles laid down by the right hon. Gentleman the President of the Board of Education, in his speech last year for dealing with education, have been sanctioned on the whole by the Kempe Committee, and we propose to reconstitute the Education Grant upon the principle laid down then. What are the two main principles laid down by the Kempe Committee? That there should be a distinction between the richer and the poorer areas, and between the areas that spend much on education and areas that spend little on education.
80§ Take Bournemouth. A penny rate in Bournemouth raises as much per child as a sixpenny rate at Walsall.
§ In Hove a penny rate raises as much per child as a sevenpenny rate in Dudley.
§ Take a second case! Halifax spends 126s. 2d. on the education of each child as against 61s. 10d. spent by Preston.
§ Barry spends 156s. 6d. as against 53s. 10d. spent by Grantham.
§ Surrey spends 103s. 5d. per child as against 67s. 11d. by Shropshire.
§ We propose that the Grant should be distributed in such a way as to give the greatest measure of relief to the poorest districts and to the districts where the expenditure is highest. The increased cost of the Exchequer of this Grant will be £2,750,000 for England and Wales only.
§ Sir PHILIP MAGNUSIs that the total increase?
§ Mr. LLOYD GEORGEThe total increase in relief of rates. This year the Grant will be confined to the necessitous school areas to enable them to tide over their difficulties until this' Grant comes into operation. But there are certain specific services that the Government feel ought to receive special encouragement in addition to this Grant. They are services dealing with the health of the children. The teachers, the inspectors, members of education authorities, have repeatedly urged upon the Government that hundreds of thousands of children attend school daily in a condition of semi-starvation, and to attempt to teach them and keep thorn there for hours trying to teach them in that condition is not merely mockery but torture. A voluntary Act was passed, and it has been a very useful Act, and met with very considerable success. It has been computed there are 600,000 children in that condition attending school daily; 360,000 of them are receiving some measure of relief under the Act introduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington (Mr. Thomas Lough). That was a very great work of humanity and of efficiency, and the report of the inspectors as to the difference in the physical appearance, the mental alertness, and the teachableness of these children is worth reading, and it is obvious to those who before that Act was passed had the wretchedness of teaching them and since then, have had the pleasure of teaching them. But there are still about 250,000 children who receive no relief at all under this Act, and there are 81 many others who receive inadequate relief. There is no provision for Saturdays or holidays, and they come back at the end of their holidays exactly the same—[HON. MEMBERS: "Worse!"]—as tired and listless as they were before. Now the State proposes henceforth, when local authorities undertake this task, the Exchequer will contribute one half the expenditure. Then there are further Grants for health work amongst children in other directions. We are already finding the money for the medical inspection and treatment of children. Then we propose there should be a Grant for physical training and open-air schools—and I am told that about one-fifth or one-sixth of the children stand in urgent need of training of that kind—for dealing with tuberculosis in children. There is an epidemic Grant to help the local authorities to close the schools without loss where there is an epidemic in the neighbourhood. There are special Grants for schools for deformed children, for the feeble-minded and crippled, and we also propose to aid the schools for mothers—the maternity centres which have sprung up in many parts of the country and which are doing most admirable work. The other Grants are for technical, secondary, and higher education—to make it more accessible to the masses of the children and to extend its sphere of influence where children show any aptitude to take advantage of it. We compare very unfavourably with Germany and the United States of America in this respect—very unfavourably. There there is adequate provision for technical training, secondary and higher training for every child who shows any special gift for taking advantage of it, and I consider that this fact is a greater menace to our trade than any arrangements of tariffs would be. We propose that there should be a very substantial Grant for this purpose, which will include the Grant for pensions for secondary school teachers, in order to attract the best men to that most important profession. There will be a Grant for special training of teachers already in schools in subjects specially appropriate to rural areas, manual instruction, cookery, physical exercise, and commercial subjects, and the total cost for the first year will be £560,000 for these Grants and £282,000 for the other Grants which I mentioned. That would be for the first full year.
§ Mr. LLOYD GEORGEYes. The total increase in the Education Grant for England and Wales this year will be £515,000. We only propose to deal with necessitous school areas and the feeding of school children. Next year the increase will come to £3,892,000.