EDUCATION (EMERGENCY) BILL. [H.L.] (Hansard, 3 October 1939)

§ THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF EDUCATION (EARL DE LA WARR)
My Lords, I cannot say that it gives me any satisfaction to ask your Lordships to give this Bill a Second Reading. Nor, I think, is it to be wondered at that I should say that, as it involves a retrogression—a temporary one, it is true, but nevertheless a retrogression—in the field of education. But the hard facts of the present situation 1212 have to be faced, as I hope to show your Lordships, and they make necessary this backward step. Your Lordships will remember that it is now only three years since you gave your assent, unanimously, to a measure which provided for the raising of the school-leaving age from fourteen to fifteen. It was to date from September 1 of this year. The purpose of this Bill is to suspend that provision, and I will venture to give your Lordships, as briefly as I can, the reasons which have led His Majesty's Government to take this decision.
The Government scheme for the evacuation of school children was designed primarily to safeguard the lives of our young people, and though, of course, the need for the continued education of the children was not lost sight of, we undoubtedly find ourselves at this time faced with educational conditions that are all too painfully different from those which we envisaged when we passed the 1936 Act. In all evacuation areas, and indeed in some neutral areas—though here I hope the position will very soon be remedied—the elementary schools are closed, and even when all the schools in the reception areas are open, as most of them are already, the conditions under the evacuation scheme, such as the double-shift system, for instance, will be such as to make the extra year at school of very little value. In this connection your Lordships will remember that the Board always, in making a case for the raising of the school age, made it clear that they envisaged the last year being of a somewhat different character and of definite use to the growing child.
Now, this is the position, and I think your Lordships will share my view that in present conditions it would really be little short of a fraud on the parents to compel them to send their children to school between fourteen and fifteen, instead of allowing them to seek employment, as they could do before the 1936 Act was passed. It would, of course, be open to them to leave their children at school after fourteen on a voluntary basis, and, for myself, I certainly hope they will do so, unless they have some suitable employment in view for their children. There are one or two other reasons for the Bill on which I might venture to touch. Under existing conditions exemptions are likely to be given very freely, indeed on a wholesale basis. Your Lordships will 1213 agree that this would be a very bad precedent for normal times. Moreover, the procedure is an extremely complicated one, and it would be very difficult to find people to-day to undertake the task of granting or refusing exemptions conscientiously.
There is one other point. Some of your Lordships may ask whether the postponement of the appointed day applies equally to the provision in respect of grants for non-provided schools which are contained in Section 8 of the 1936 Act. The answer is in the negative. It is, of course, true that owing to the scarcity of building labour and materials some proposals for voluntary senior schools, which would otherwise have materialised, will fail to do so under the provisions of Section 8 of that Act. That is a hardship, but I have looked very carefully into the matter and I cannot see that a remedy for it can be found here and now on a basis that is likely to be fair. In the first place the duration of the war is obviously uncertain, and equally uncertain is the interval of time which will elapse between the end of the war and the resumption of normal building conditions. In these circumstances, the best course would be to review the whole position after the war, and I would here and now, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, be prepared to undertake that we should then give sympathetic consideration to the possibility of legislation to meet cases which have failed to materialise owing to causes beyond the control of the promoters or the authorities. I hope your Lordships will agree that that is probably the most practicable and the fairest way of dealing with that rather unsatisfactory situation.
In conclusion, I should like to emphasize what I said at the beginning of my remarks—namely, that this Bill is a postponement and not a repeal of the principle of raising the school age from fourteen to fifteen, which the Act of 1936 embodied. That principle has been accepted by the Government and by the country, and there can be no question whatsoever of going back on it or failing to put it into effect as soon as circumstances permit. I beg to move.

LORD STRABOLGI
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Snell has been called out of the House and has asked me to express our views, which I shall do very briefly. In the circumstances of to-day we cannot oppose the introduction of this Bill. The only thing is that on the Committee stage we may ask your Lordships to agree to an Amendment defining a little more clearly the date of the postponement—in other words, pinning the Government, or whichever Government is then in office, a little more closely to introduce again the upper age limit as soon as possible after the conclusion of hostilities.

THE LORD ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY
My Lords, I may be forgiven one or two sentences on this matter, for two reasons. One is that I have always been among those who pressed for the raising of the school age, but in view of the circumstances so clearly indicated by the noble Earl I am convinced this is not the time to proceed with what otherwise would have been a very welcome extension of the educational facilities of the country. The other reason is that I am, naturally, greatly interested in the building of voluntary senior schools. It was our great desire to co-operate with the Government in the provision of these most necessary schools, but at the present time, owing to the immense preoccupation of local education authorities with other matters and owing to the obvious difficulties of securing labour, materials, and the like, it has been quite impossible for many of these schemes, which had already reached almost the point of completion, to fulfil the obligation imposed by the Act of 1936 to have reached completion or reasonable prospect of completion by September, 1940. I fully recognise the reasons which have led the noble Earl to consider that it would not be appropriate to deal with this matter by legislation at the present time, but I welcome his assurance that when the war is over and the time comes for reviving some of these schemes, which through no fault of the promoters it has been impossible to carry out, the Government will give full consideration—I know they will—to the possibility of any legislation that might cover and exonerate those bodies for any failure to comply with the exact provisions of the Act.