§ Mr. POTTSasked the President of the Board of Education if he will lay upon the Table of the House Mr. Fisher's letter to Lord Burnham which shows that he declined to accept the stipulation contained in Article 16 of the Burnham Report, whereby it is provided that no scale in operation on the date of this Report shall be reduced, nor shall the salary of any individual teacher be reduced, by reason of anything contained in this Report?
Mr. WOODI am arranging for a copy of the Report of the Burnham Committee on Scales of Salaries for Teachers in Technical, etc., Schools, to which I presume the hon. Member is referring, to be placed in the Library of the House. The correspondence between Lord Burnham and the President of the Board is appended to the Report. As I informed the hon. Member on the 27th February, the President's letter of the 20th July, 1921, specifies the extent to which he accepted the recommendations of the Committee.
§ Mr. C. W. CROOKasked the President of the Board of Education whether his attention has been called to a statement made by the chairman of the Lowestoft Education Committee that the authority 1321W of that area adopted the Burnham Scale II for the remuneration of elementary school teachers under duress; and whether it is the fact that the Board put pressure on the Lowestoft authority or any other authority to adopt the scale allocated to the area by the Burnham Committee?
Mr. WOODI have seen in the Press the statement referred to, and so far as the Board are concerned I am at a loss to understand what it means. I find that in his letter of the 28th June, 1921, to Lord Burnham, the President of the Board said, "I accept the allocation set out in Part I of the Committee's Schedule, and am prepared to adopt it generally as a basis of expenditure up to 31st March, 1925, on which the Board will be prepared to pay grant in each area, if the authority is willing to adopt the allocated scale." This has, so far as I know, never been interpreted by any authority as meaning that, if an authority was not willing to adopt a scale as high as the allocated scale, the Board would refuse to pay grant on the expenditure, nor has that been the practice of the Board.