Registers

and

Mark Books

For

PRIVATE and SECONDARY SCHOOLS

The E.S.A. publish a complete Series of Registers and Mark Books suitable for all requirements. REGISTER OF ADMISSION AND RECORD No. 18. Containing spaces for 200 Pupils clearly printed and strongly bound. Each 10s. 6d. net. The forms contained in the Register are the same as the Board of Education Form 71S.

REGISTERS OF ATTENDANCES

No. 13. Containing spaces for 45 names, three terms, strongly bound. 1s. 6d. net each. No. 15. Containing spaces for 50 names, three terms, strongly bound. 1s. 6d. net each. No. 254. Containing spaces for 44 names, three terms, strongly bound. 1s. 10d. net each.

Note.-The above can be supplied bound specially to order, to contain sufficient spaces for recording attendances of the whole school.

The above fulfil all the requirements of the Board of Education.

Scholarships, Official Notices, School Transfers, Partnerships, &c.—
9d. per line; minimum charge, 7s. 6d.

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All letters respecting Advertisements and Subscriptions should be addressedMR. WILLIAM RICE, THREE LUDGATE BROADWAY, LONDON, E.C. 4.

to whom all remittances should be made payable. Orders and Cheques should be crossed, "The Midland Bank, Ludgate Branch." Postage stamps can only be received at the rate of thirteen pence to the shilling.

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Date of publication of next issue will be found at top left-hand corner of front page.

LONDON: MR. WILLIAM RICE, LUDGATE BROADWAY, E.C. 4.

Careers and Qualifications

I. INTRODUCTION

By R. F. CHOLMELEY, C.B.E., M.A., formerly Headmaster of Owen's School, Islington, and President of the Incorporated Association of Headmasters

NE of the most difficult and complicated of the modern

find the right career. It is, I think, greatly to the credit of the modern teacher that this development of educational responsibility is now generally accepted, to the advantage not only of those who are directly concerned-pupils and employers in each particular case, but of the teaching profession itself. A profession which considers its responsibility ended when the boy or girl leaves school, or, without quite doing that, is content to say that it is the business of schools to teach their pupils how to live, but not how to make a living, may be a high-minded profession, but is likely to be a narrow-minded one. There was a time, no doubt-though I don't know when it was when schoolmasters and schoolmistresses could take that line, with a Mea virtute me involvo. there may be places-though I don't know where they are-where that line can still be taken but now at any rate, and in most places of education, reliance upon the school to advise, and to organize its advice upon the choice of a career, is more and more coming to be regarded as natural and indeed inevitable. That this is to the advantage of the teaching profession is surely undeniable; the common defect of learned professions is that they tend to become exclusively concerned with learning, and the danger against which the teaching profession, perhaps more than most, needs to provide is the danger of becoming too professional, of limiting its sympathy and understanding to the immediate needs of children and young persons," and losing touch with the world in which those children and young persons have ultimately to live and in which the value of their education will ultimately be tested. There is no better corrective to this tendency than the double necessity of looking at the pupil with a view to the world outside and looking at the

world outside with a view to the pupil; and I welcome the enterprise of The Journal of Education in planning the series of articles which I have the honour to introduce, not merely as likely to be of immediate practical value, but as an encouragement to a reasonable and lively conception of the proper outlook of the teacher-whose motto really ought to be Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto.

It is, or ought to be, a commonplace by this time, that the development of education, and in particular of secondary education, during the last twenty or thirty years has made an enormous alteration in the problem of organizing the relations between education and industry-between what happens to children at school and what is going to happen to them afterwards, or, to put it in a more concrete form, between what they learn and what they will do, between how they are treated and how they will be treated, between how they are taught to behave and how they will have to behave when they pass from a community, of which the main point is that their interests are the prime care of everybody concerned, to places where the main point is that they must justify themselves by attending to somebody else's interests. The distinction is not so sharp as may seem to be implied; a school would be a poor school in which the subordination of private interests-or, at at least of private preferences to general aims was not one of its chief lessons, and an occupation in which nothing counts except the balance-sheet is a poor occupation; but no one will deny that the world of school and the world of business are run on rather different principles and that the transition from the one to the other needs intelligent organization.

Young people go into business, in the most general sense, at one of four stages: on leaving the primary school, on reaching the First School Examination stage, on reaching the Higher School Examination stage, or after a course at a university-roughly speaking, at 14+, 16, 18, or 21. I suppose that in a perfectly arranged community nobody would leave school until he or she had got as much education as could be got at school; it is scarcely necessary to say that that is not the way things happen now, or that the children who leave school at 14 or thereabouts because they have not been offered a chance of going further or have not been able to afford to take the chance, form by far the largest class of those from whom business of all kinds is recruited. Their prospects are perhaps scarcely within the scope of these articles: but it may be worth noting that two facts in particular affect them adversely. One is the decay of the apprenticeship system: the other is the development of secondary education of various kinds, which inevitably depresses the condition of those who fail to obtain it. Their condition is depressed in three ways: first, because the assumption that those who have gone on to something beyond primary education are all who were worth it—a quite unjustified assumption, though a natural one-discourages the provision, difficult enough in any case, of a type of education in the primary school that would really help those who are left behind; next, and partly as a consequence of the same assumption, because, when they get employment, there is a tendency to think that any further education for them is unnecessary; and lastly for the obvious reason that any increase in the proportion of children who get education beyond the primary school' limits the field of desirable employment for those who do not. There is plenty of employment for them, of a kind : but the existence of an enormous reservoir of helpless children is a demoralizing fact, and a community which is willing to put up with it, is a long way from being a civilized community.

Let us turn to those with whom we are here more directly concerned those for whom the word "employment " has

NOTE.-This must not be taken to imply that nothing is done for these children in Chapter VII of the Board of Education's Report for 1925-26 there is a most interesting account of the admirable work carried out by Juvenile Employment Bureaux and Juvenile Advisory Committees under Local Authorities, and the Ministry of Labour, and by the Juvenile Organizations Committee revived in 1924, of which the Duchess of Atholl is Chairman.

made way for the more exhilarating word "career," and upon whose abilities and qualifications the leaders of the professions, of business, and of the public services are expected to turn a penetrating and even, as they think of their own less fortunate youth, maybe a wistful eye. There are three chief questions to be answered by any one who is interested in a particular candidate for a happy, prosperous, and useful life—and it is in terms of the particular candidate that all such questions have to be answered, for no amount of standardizing and testing and sorting can get rid of that responsibility; in the long run somebody has got to consider whether this particular boy or girl should be encouraged and helped to this particular start in life or some other. To say this is not to gird at organization, but to remind ourselves of the kind of organization that is required if misfits are, so far as is humanly possible, to be avoided, it must not be a reach-me-down business, but a business involving a great deal of personal measuring and appraising. The three questions are, as any one can see, first, what in the most definitely ascertainable sense, is the nature of any particular career? second, is this particular young person fitted for it? and third, how is he or she to be got into it?

A fourth question had better be answered before any general observations are made upon any of these three : what is the size of the problem? In other words, what is the output of the schools (and of the universities, if it could be adequately dealt with by figures, which is probably impossible) from this point of view? Can we get an approximate figure for the number of students of both sexes who may be expected to come on what we may call the careers market in any given year at the three stages mentioned above 16, 18, and 21 ? The answer is that we cannot : but we can get a governing figure in the number of pupils leaving secondary schools on the Grant List; we get a guiding figure in the number going on to a university; and we get a very useful set of figures from the statistics of the First and Second School Examinations. From another point of view a good deal may be learnt from the reports of such organizations as the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Employment Committees for London. For the year 1924-25 -the last for which all the sets of figures are available— we find that the number of pupils in grant-earning secondary schools was at the beginning of the school year 359,621 (England and Wales): 78,404 left school during or at the end of the school year, of whom 44,752 were over 16; 3,242 proceeded to a university, 41,447 entered for the First School Examination and 5,794 for the Second; but, presumably, all the latter took a First School examination two years before, when the figure for that examination was 38,240, so that the proportion of pupils staying on for a second examination to those who take the first would be about 15 per cent. The last figures available for the First School Examination from all types of schools are 53,564 for 1926; it would be fair to assume that at least 15 per cent of these will stay at school till 1928 and that about 8 per cent will go on to a university if this is a fair estimate, then secondary school pupils looking for a start in life at the three stages will be as follows: 16 to 18, about 45,500; 18+, about 3,700; 21 +, about 4,200. The figures are misleading, as figures usually are, for it must be remembered first that a large proportion of those who go to universities go with a particular career in view, and many of them (e.g. intending teachers) with that career assured, and secondly, that the proportion of those who go to a university varies enormously from school to school according to the social and financial position of the parents. The report of the Headmasters' Employment Committee for London contains figures for 1926 which are worth noting. This Committee, which has for several years done most valuable work, consists of a small number of Headmasters of London secondary schools and representatives of business, and is provided by the Ministry of Labour with officers and also with a very efficient secretarial staff; it is an admirable example of what a government department

can do by facilitating, without interfering with, a piece of necessary work. The number of boys dealt with during 1926 was 2,546, of whom 491 had been left over from 1925. Of these, 888 were placed and 1,103 placed themselves during the year; 555 were still unplaced at the end of it. It should be stated that these figures are affected by two facts-one, that 1926 was a year of depression, the other that for statistical purposes it contained only fifty weeks. The Committee does not deal with boys under 16; the numbers placed at various ages were as follows:

208

17-18 261

18-19 128

over 19 35

16-161 161-17 256 The average salary to begin with varied from 33 in the first group to £91 in the last. The most encouraging fact about these figures is that the last three groups together contain not much less than half the total: the detailed figures for every kind of career with which the Committee dealt cannot be quoted in full, but it may be noted that from the last three groups banks took 39 (out of a total of 54), insurance companies and brokers 70 (out of 126), civil and municipal services, &c. 48 (out of 61), city merchants 45 (out of 85).

Obviously a committee of this kind can be of real assistance, and it is a pity that the example of London has not been generally followed the obstacle is that Local Education Committees have been inclined to desire to keep this piece of organization in their own hands and out of the hands of the Ministry of Labour, though there are signs of a change in this attitude. The experience of London ought to count for something; and the objection to having this particular job done by Local Authorities is that they are apt to consider the conditions of their own areas only, sometimes to the disadvantage of the young people whose future they ought to be considering on broader lines.

Of course, there is a great deal that can scarcely be dealt with by committees of this or any other kind-the prospects of the professions, for example, and the conditions of entrance to them, entrance to the Civil Service, the Army and Navy, and the Air Force, besides occupations demanding a high standard of technical training. On all these subjects it is of the greatest importance that clear and up-to-date information should be available for those who have to advise and help their pupils. To take one example, the

YOU

profession of dentistry, in which recent legislation has both pulled up the standard and improved the prospect for the well qualified, and in which there is a great demand for students; not only so, but the Dental Board of the United Kingdom is prepared to spend a large sum of money in providing bursaries and other forms of assistance to help those who desire to qualify; the profession is not overcrowded, and it is maintained that if the number who enter it every year-now about 200-were doubled, or even trebled, there would be plenty of opportunity for all.

Again, there are the opportunities to be found in the Dominions; much has yet to be done before migration within the British Commonwealth of Nations takes its proper place among the prospects to which English parents look as likely to enable their children to find a congenial and prosperous way of living. But no amount of information saves the teacher from the fundamental necessity of finding out, so far as it is possible to find out, what sort of start in life each separate young person is fitted for, not only by the ability which may open a particular door, or any one of half a dozen doors, but by the temperament upon which it depends whether he will make good when he has got through it. Few experiences are more humiliating than the discovery, after you have carefully manoeuvred a promising pupil into a job, that it is a complete misfit. One great advantage in the fact that business is tending-though slowly to realize the value of school education, and to take boys and girls at 17 or 18 instead of at 15 or 16, is that the candidate's own judgment is so much more to be relied on -not merely in the initial choice, but in discriminating before it is too late between those doors which lead somewhere and those which, for all their mahogany and brass lead nowhere at all, or at best no further than the mat. They are on the whole less likely than they would have been at sixteen to be hooked by what looks a good initial salary without troubling about prospects; whether on the other hand the longer stay at school disposes them to play for safety when adventurousness is the right game, as it surely is for some, is a disputable question. These things are the test of the teacher's psychological observation; he need not think meanly of himself; if he will observe, and mark what he sees, in daily contact with his pupils, he can give the professional psychologist weight and a beating.

In

YOU are good enough to invite me, once more, to emerge from seclusion-to express my views on education. doing so, you are aware of my prejudices; you know my opinions are not shared by your subscribers and supporters. I am neither an expert nor an "enthusiast.' Your request reminds me of an incident at one of the annual galas of Northumberland miners. The chosen speaker was Mr. James Larkin, notorious as an implacable Communist. The Chairman was the late Charles Fenwick, for many years a trusted representative of Labour in the House of Commons. He introduced the speaker of the day in flattering terms. Mr. Larkin, rising with alacrity, said: "Fellow workmen! I was gratified to receive the invitation from your Association conveyed to me by my dear and esteemed old friend Charlie Fenwick" (and here he placed a caressing hand on the Chairman's shoulder). But," he continued, "fellow workmen, Charlie Fenwick ought to have been on the scrap-heap twenty years ago." I am in like case. Your constituents, animated by the poetry of great educational enterprises, will feel that an Old Fogey ought to have been on the scrap heap, not twenty, but forty, years ago.

"

I am no longer, you know, actively concerned in the education of youth. My acquaintance with boards, authori

ties, and associations, never intimate, is more remote than ever. You will not expect me, therefore, to discuss Government regulations, local proposals, or the provocative resolutions of innumerable associations. I can only attempt with complete detachment and incomplete knowledge to inquire on the eve of a New Year whether, in educational policy, we appear to be any wiser than we were at the end of 1926. Nine years ago, I reflect, the Academic Minister with Utopian predilections contrived to pass an important Act, when Parliament was otherwise pre-occupied; to embark on speculative enterprises likely to impede development for many years. He who dines at the Inn of Folly must not grumble at the bill." But even the diner who does not grumble may lament the dissipation of resources that might have been otherwise productively employed.

The public were beguiled to contemplate an educational renaissance-the establishment of a national system available for all persons capable of profiting by it. Authorities were to prepare schemes for "the progressive development and comprehensive organization of education" in their areas. Schemes have been elaborated, but the wherewithal to fertilize them is still to seek. And the money cannot be found, without imposing upon industry a serious additional burden. Already the burden is beyond