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in which work is done, of the methods adopted, and indeed of the 00s of a school and the moral influence it exerted. It tempted even the best teachers to the adoption of crude methods designed to secure the maximum number of 'passes' rather than to secure the highest results of school education. Nevertheless, it undoubtedly forced upon teachers the necessity of attending more closely to the 'rank and file' of the scholars, and it produced at least one result especially satisfactory to a Chancellor of the Exchequer; for the Government grant shrank in 1865 to £636,806 as compared with £836,920 in 1859.

All later experience has led by degrees to the modification of the 'payment by results' theory as originally embodied in Mr Lowe's Code. His successors have one by one sought to encourage the teaching of other subjects than Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, and have made part of the grant contingent on attendance as well as on examination. Mr Forster in 1869 obtained facts which showed how lamentably insufficient was the provision which up to that date had been made by voluntary effort to meet the educational needs of the people. My own report in that year showed that in Leeds with a population of 253,110, there were in average attendance in schools under inspection 12,422, in schools not under inspection 7,070, in other schools, reformatory, poor law, &c., 3,040, total 22,932; or less than ten per cent. of the population.

In the whole of the inspected schools of Leeds, only 274 scholars were presented in Standard VI, that being the class appropriate to scholars of 12 years of age. Contrast with these figures the returns just issued by the Leeds School Board for the year 1899. The population was 409,472, average attendance in inspected schools 67,375; and there is a good supply of Higher Grade and Technical Schools.

What Mr Forster's great measure did for the whole country cannot be measured merely by statistics. But it may be worth while to contrast the figures for the Metropolis alone in the year 1870 with those of the present day. With a population

of 3,258,000, requiring, according to the ordinary calculation 543,000 select places, there were in the former year in the various National, British, and other voluntary schools, places for 275,136. At the present moment, with a population of nearly 5,000,000, there are in London 226,381 on the rolls of voluntary schools aided and inspected, or rather fewer than in 1871; while in the course of thirty years about 450 new schools, each consisting of three departments,-boys, girls, and infantshave been erected by the London School Board, and the number of scholars on the rolls of these schools is 752,259, or threequarters of a million. Thus more than three-fourths of the children now attending Elementary Schools in London are provided for by the School Board, and the proportion increases yearly.

I said that the tendency of the Codes and Regulations of the Education Department had been steadily to mitigate what might be deemed the hard and mechanical operation of the system of 'paying by results.' Mr Forster sought then in introducing the Education Act to make the Code more elastic and to encourage the teaching of other than the three elementary subjects. Grants for discipline and organization were afterwards added; and in 1881 Mr Mundella recognised for the first time the system of training and of manual exercise which had been devised by Fröbel, and which has since done so much to brighten the school lives of the infant scholars and to increase their intelligence. He also sought by a graduated payment under the name of the "Merit Grant" to place it in the power of the Inspector to recommend a special award in respect of general intelligence, order, skilful method, beauty and perfectness of equipment, or any form of excellence which could not be adequately measured by the results of individual examination as tabulated in a schedule of "passes." Another Royal Commission, presided over by Lord Cross in 1887, discussed with much fulness and ability the conditions under which the grants ought to be assessed, and the bearing of the

mode of assessment on the efficiency of the schools. They finally concluded that:

"The distribution of the Parliamentary grant cannot be wholly freed from its present dependence on the results of examination without the risk of incurring graver evils than it is sought to cure. Nor can we believe that Parliament will continue to make so large an annual grant as that which now appears in the Education estimates without in some way satisfy. ing itself that the quality of the education given justifies the expenditure. Nevertheless we are unanimously of opinion that the present system of 'payment by results' is carried too far and is too rigidly applied, and that it ought to be modified and relaxed in the interests equally of the scholars, of the teachers, and of education itself."

Accordingly the Report proceeded to recommend some substantial modifications of the system then in force, e.g. that there should be a fixed grant of 10s. per scholar, and a variable grant of about the same amount, dependent partly on the results of individual examination and partly on various conditions hitherto recognizable under the name of the 'Merit Grant,' the principle of which they sought to retain, though under a slightly altered form. Effect was subsequently given to these recommendations by changes made during the VicePresidency of Sir W. Hart Dyke and of Mr Acland. But later experience has, under the present régime, led to the complete abandonment of all attempts to graduate the grant according to the degrees of efficiency in a school. In place of a report on the individual examination of scholars there is to be one summary estimate of the school as a whole; in place of an annual examination, occasional inspection without notice; and in place of a variable grant, dependent on a report in detail on the several subjects of instruction and on specific merits or educational defects, one 'block' grant, payable to all schools alike, which are not found to be bad enough to justify the withholding of the grant altogether.

This change of policy has been received with much public approval, but it is too early to forecast all its consequences. The policy which trusts the teachers, and provides that if a

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school is not up to a high level of excellence it shall nevertheless receive the maximum, or nearly the maximum grant, in order that it may make itself better, is a generous policy. The reaction against a discredited mode of awarding the public grant has been complete, and it remains to be seen whether the opposite of wrong proves to be right. Yet, after all, liberty to improve may imply in some cases liberty to remain unimproved. Many of the best school managers are beginning to complain that some of the safeguards for thorough and accurate teaching have disappeared, and they are looking anxiously for some other safeguards to take their place. The motive force in the grant-earning system was not a very noble one, but some motive force may still be found needful in hundreds of schools, which are neither good nor bad, but dull and apathetic, contentedly acquiescing in routine and in a low standard of aim as well as achievement. We do not want to bring about again the state of things which existed when the Duke of Newcastle's Commission made its report, and when slovenly teaching and slovenly inspection seemed to call for a sharp and summary remedy. So it may be that further modification in the Code will prove to be needed and that new precautions will be required.

The Scotch Education Department, which on more than one occasion has set an example worthy of imitation, has in its new code for this year taken two such precautions: (1) the permission to the Inspector to recommend deductions of one to five-tenths, from the Block grant, for faults of instruction, or imperfect discipline; and (2) the award of a leaving or Merit Certificate to scholars who at the end of their school course prove on examination to have received a satisfactory general education appropriate to their age. The former of these expedients will discriminate the degrees of efficiency in the inspected schools, will make the inspectors' reports more, detailed, and therefore more helpful to managers in their efforts to improve; and the latter will set before every teacher the

goal which ought to be attained, and, by means of an effective individual examination at the seventh standard, correct any tendency to laxity which may have been observed in the ordinary work of the school. Neither of these two expedients has yet been adopted in England. The great problem which confronts all Governments in regard to education,-how to give guidance and regulation to those who need them, and liberty to those who know how to use it,-is not yet finally solved; and the nineteenth century, though it has made distinct advance and tried many fruitful experiments, leaves to its successor a system which with all its merits is still imperfect, and on which the last word has not yet been said.

One of the greatest needs of our time is that of some means of prolonging educational discipline and cultivating the desire for self-improvement beyond the age of fourteen, when the strictly primary course is finished. In Germany and Switzerland this object is largely attained by legislation, which compels the boy or girl to attend a supplementary school for two or three evenings in the week. In France and Belgium it is met partly by the Écoles Primaires Supérieures, which carry on the primary course to new subjects, but on the same lines, to the age of 16 or 17 and partly by various technical and industrial institutions, apprentice schools, schools of commerce, and the like. We are waking up to a sense of the need which exists for some provision of this kind, but it is curiously characteristic of the haphazard character of English legislation on this subject that we owe the chief modern resources for this supplementary instruction to unexpected accidents. In 1890 Parliament was called upon to deal with the excise duties derived from the sale of spirits, and it was proposed by the Government to devote a considerable portion of this sum to compensation to publicans for the loss of licenses. But energetic efforts were made to prevent such an appropriation. Mr A. Acland interposed, and suggested that this part of the revenue should be ear-marked and devoted to Technical Education. The moment was favour

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