Εικόνες σελίδας
PDF
Ηλεκτρ. έκδοση

the Trustees of such School Buildings and Premises to allow the same to be applied and used, concurrently with the Education and Instruction of such Masters or Mistresses, for the Purpose of boarding other Persons, and of educating and instructing the said Persons in religious and useful Knowledge.

V. And whereas the absolute Owners of Land may grant, The Owners of Land empowered subject to the Regulations and Provisions prescribed by the to vest any QuanStatutes in such Behalf, any Quantity of such Land to Trustees, tity of Land for to be held upon charitable Purposes; and it would be beneficial Acts in Corpora Purposes of these that they should be authorized to exercise such Power in respect tions.. of Lands granted for the Sites or for the Endowment of the last-mentioned Schools, or of Schools for poor Persons, by vesting the same so as to secure it permanently for the Purpose of the Trust, without the Necessity of subsequent Renewals of the Deeds of Trust: Be it therefore enacted, That where any such Person shall be lawfully entitled to convey an Estate in Land to Trustees, to hold the same upon any charitable Use, and shall be desirous of conveying the same for the Purposes of the Acts hereinbefore referred to, or this Act, or for the Endowment of such Schools, such Person may grant and convey the same to any Corporation or Corporations as aforesaid, to be held in trust for such Purposes, whatever may be the Quantity of Land or Extent of the Estate so to be granted and conveyed.

the

ing the Lord's

Interest and that of the Copyholder in Copyhold

VI. And be it enacted, That where Land of Copyhold or Mode of conveyCustomary Tenure shall have been or shall be granted for Purposes of the said Acts, the Conveyance of the same by any Deed wherein the Copyholder shall grant and convey his Land. Interest, and the Lord shall also grant his Interest, shall be deemed to be valid and sufficient to vest the Freehold Interest in the Grantee or Grantees thereof without any Surrender or Admittance or Enrolment in the Lord's Court.

Clause.

VII. And be it enacted, That, except in Cases where there Interpretation shall be something in the Subject or Context repugnant to such Construction, Words occurring in this Act and the aboverecited Acts importing the Singular Number shall include the Plural Number, and Words importing the Plural Number shall include the Singular Number; and Words importing the Masculine Gender only shall include Females; and the Word "Land" shall include Messuages, Houses, Lands, Tenements, Hereditaments, and Heritages of every Tenure; and the Word "Lease" shall include an Under-lease, Agreement for a Lease, and Missive of Lease; and the Word "Owner" shall include any Person or Corporation enabled under the Provisions of the said firstly hereinbefore mentioned Act to convey Lands for the Purposes thereof.

VIII. And be it enacted, That this Act may be amended or Act may be repealed by any Act to be passed in this present Session of Par- amended, &c liament.

CIRCULAR LETTERS, INSTRUCTIONS, &c.

Printed Form of Letter relating to insufficiency of Estimated Income for a School.

SIR,

Committee of Council on Education,

Privy Council Office, Downing-street.

I am directed to call your attention to the estimate which you have formed of the probable income of your school, viz., £ ; while accommodation is provided in it for children. The funds available for the maintenance of the school allow therefore less than per head for each child.

My Lords are unwilling to expend the public money in erecting schools which there is not a fair prospect of adequately maintaining, and the suspension of many schools, the erection of which has been so aided, for want of the requisite funds to carry them on, imposes upon my Lords the necessity of inquiring with more strictness than they have hitherto done into this part of every application made to them.

Their Lordships are of opinion that 10s. per annum is considerably below the cost of efficiently educating each child in an elementary school.

Assuming that three-fourths of the accommodation provided will be permanently occupied by scholars (and unless this be the case the school will not have justified its foundation), a calculation of 7s. 6d. per head for each child, upon the total number accommodated allows 10s. per head to be expended upon the number of children who ought to be in ordinary attendance upon the school.

The estimated income of your school falls short of this minimum allowance, and my Lords cannot therefore proceed with your application for a building grant until they have been informed how the deficiency is to be met.

Letter to Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools, detailing arrangements to be made for subdivision of their districts.

REVEREND SIR,

Committee of Council on Education,
Privy Council Office, Downing-street,
26 July 1849.

My Lords have had under consideration the great amount of additional labour imposed upon Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools by the necessity, under the present arrangement, of visiting the same parts of their districts frequently in the course of the year. In the earlier stages of the administration of their Lordships' Minutes of August and December 1846, it appeared of great importance that applications for annual grants should receive attention as promptly as possible, in order that the interest excited by the novelty of their Lordships' measures might be turned to practical account in widely identifying them with the elementary

education of the country. The system, however, has now reached a stage which renders it absolutely necessary to economize the labour and expense of administering it, while the reason for attending to applications in the order of time, without reference to geographical distribution, has to a great extent ceased to exist.

Their Lordships consider, therefore, the time to have arrived for geographically grouping those schools to which annual grants are payable, and for taking such steps as may be requisite for making the dates of these grants, and of the examinations on which they depend, correspond with the local classification of the schools. When all the existing cases have been made to conform to this rule, it will be easy to maintain the same order among future ones. I have the honor, therefore, to enclose a list of the schools in your district in which pupil-teachers have been apprenticed, or certificated teachers are engaged, with the dates of the periods at which they require to be visited respectively.

I am to request that you will go carefully over this list, and divide the schools into six groups, so as to form six subdivisions of your district, and that you will assign two consecutive months to each of these subdivisions.

With regard to those schools in which certificated teachers and not pupil-teachers are engaged, they may be visited at any time within the year for which the grant is made. You will, with regard to them, have nothing to consider but their local position, and to group them accordingly.

Such difficulty as exists in the change concerns the pupil-teachers. But my Lords, on receiving from you the local classification of the schools in your district which I have described, will correspond with the managers for the purpose of effecting a change in the dates of the indentures, wherever necessary, so as to bring all those which belong to the same subdivision to the same date within a month. Thus, in one of these subdivisions, all the schools will have apprentices whose indentures date either on the 1st of January or the 1st of February; in another, all the indentures will date either on the 1st of March or the 1st of April, and so on. It is thought better to make six subdivisions than twelve, because there is no practical objection to ignoring the difference of a single month in the date of the indentures, while it is important not to lay down so rigid a scheme as will not easily admit of slight deviations to suit particular circumstances.

In making this subdivision of your district into six circles, you will, of course, be guided chiefly by geographical contiguity, and the means of reaching the different places from one another or from a common centre. But, subordinate to that consideration, you will bear in mind that it is desirable not to make more changes in the dates of the indentures than may be necessary for the purpose aimed at. It will also be advisable to adapt the date fixed upon for each circle as much as possible to the peculiar

character of the locality. In the purely agricultural parts of your district, for instance, the schools will be either closed or very thinly attended during the harvest, and the time fixed upon for visiting them should be at some other period of the year. It should also be remembered that the annual recurrence of the Easter and Christmas examinations causes a temporary cessation of inspection for somewhat more than a month about each of those times.

When the district has been in this manner subdivided, their Lordships will be careful that all future indentures shall be so dated as not to interfere with this subdivision.

By this arrangement, it will be possible for Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools to avail themselves of the plan proposed in the marked passage of the enclosed explanatory letter, and combine the written examination of the pupil-teachers of several schools within a moderate distance by assembling them in some central place and giving all those of the same standing the same papers to answer. Thus more time will be left for a thorough inspection of the schools in which these pupil-teachers are employed, and for an examination into their powers of teaching, and the success they may have had in the discharge of their practical duties as assistants to the master or mistress. The time saved by doing away with the necessity of frequent journeys will be devoted to the inspection of schools which have not applied for annual grants, many of which have, under the present arrangement, not been visited for a considerable period; an omission which my Lords know to have been inevitable, but which they do not therefore the less deplore, or are the less anxious to supply.

The subdivisions thus constituted in your district may hereafter possibly serve as the basis of further measures having the same object.

I am to request that you will return the List transmitted to to you, together with the grouping which you may think best to propose, within one fortnight from the date of this letter, in order that the arrangements may not become still more complicated by the accumulation of many fresh cases in the interval.

Your return had better be arranged in the following form :SUB-DISTRICT OF A.

January and February.

1. Schools in which certificated teachers are engaged.

2. Schools in which pupil-teachers are engaged.

3. Schools on List as liable to inspection.

And so on for each of the six subdistricts or circles into which it is proposed to divide your district.

It is probable that the change cannot be completely effected before the beginning of next year, as it will involve much correspondence. I have the honor to be, &c.,

[blocks in formation]

Circular Letter proposing change in date of Indentures of Apprenticeship of Pupil Teachers or Stipendiary Monitors.

Committee of Council on Education,

SIR,
Privy Council Office, Downing-street, 1849.
WITH reference to the pupil-teachers who are apprenticed
in your school, I beg leave to invite your attention to the follow-

ing remarks.

You will recollect that, in the letter announcing their Lordships' intention to entertain your application for this form of annual aid in the maintenance of your school, my Lords stated that Her Majesty's Inspectors "had been directed to devote their whole time to the duties arising out of the Minutes of the Committee of Council, dated August and December 1846, and that the schools applying for assistance would be inspected in succession."

The extent to which the managers of schools have availed themselves of this form of assistance, has now rendered it absolutely necessary to make arrangements for economising the labour of Her Majesty's Inspectors, so that those schools which lie near to each other may be visited about the same period, and the time, money, and exertion, now lost by Her Majesty's Inspectors in travelling backwards and forwards several times in the year to the same part of their districts, may be saved.

It is obvious that as the inconvenience and expensiveness of the present system has arisen from the course which had to be pursued, in the first instance, of directing Her Majesty's Inspectors to attend to applications in the order of time, so the remedy can only be sought in a rearrangement of the respective dates at which each of the schools in the different districts require such visits, upon a principle which will bring the order of time into unison with that of geographical distribution.

For this purpose, it will be necessary that the present indentures should in some instances be cancelled, and new ones executed, bearing the requisite date. In proposing such a change, their Lordships would of course be anxious to protect all the parties interested from loss. Such of the pupil-teachers as would be advanced a few months, would be thereby so far gainers in arriving sooner at the higher rates of stipend promised to the later years; and my Lords would be prepared to take into consideration, in reviewing the papers, the shorter time allowed to the studies of the year. Those on the other hand whose time of apprenticeship was lengthened by the change would receive payments proportionate to the longer time of service, and would, besides, have the opportunity of regaining more than their original position at any one of the subsequent examinations.

E. g.-Suppose a pupil-teacher is apprenticed from September 1848, and that his school can most conveniently be visited

VOL. I.

d

« ΠροηγούμενηΣυνέχεια »