Education: New Deal in Britain

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This week Britain reached a major milestone in its educational history. On April 1 "the greatest Education Act ever known in these islands" went into effect: 1) it raises the period of compulsory school attendance, eventually, to age 16 fulltime, part-time to 18; 2) it provides the widest choice of curricula for all; 3) it sets up almost extravagant standards for new school buildings—of which there will be hundreds.

When Minister of Education Richard Austin Butler started to lay his plans shortly after the Act was passed last year, he ran smack into the fact that Britain's teacher shortage is worse than the U.S.'s. The number of teachers in publicly supported schools has dwindled from a peacetime 200,000 to 178,000. For the new program, some 270,000 will be needed.

Minister Butler found a radical solution. Three emergency teachers' colleges are scheduled to open this month, to be followed by an additional 57. The carefully selected students (ex-service personnel, aged 21 to 35) will be put to work after only one year of training, but will get two more years of training-on-the-job. These colleges, each designed for 200 to 300 students, already have thousands of applicants.

Because of the war, the school housing problem will take much longer to solve. But in their hit-or-miss way, enemy bombers did Britain a great service in destroying more than 500 of its older schools, badly damaging hundreds more, and prompting the condemnation of 699 others. Under the provisions of the Act, these ruins will be replaced and augmented by bright, shiny buildings that will include dining rooms, medical dispensaries, film projection rooms, sites away from traffic and other buildings, and (in nursery schools) perambulator sheds and "a place for children to dig."

The framers of the Act also remembered another critical point: that before it gets as good schooling as it wants, Britain, like the U.S., must raise teachers' pay. (In Peterborough, England, a school advertised in the local paper recently for an experienced cook and an English-Latin-Science teacher with a college degree. Salaries offered: for the teacher, £150 a year; for the cook, £150-£180.) Beginning this week, public-school teachers of all grades will get a fat raise.