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170
These duties as to maintenance need not be carried out, however,
unless the parliamentary grant is at least one-half of the net amount
of such cost. The expenses incurred by the local authority must not
exceed a ½d. rate. Nothing in the Act affects the powers and duties of
Poor Law, local education, or lunacy authorities with respect to any
defectives.
If the local authority make default in the performance of any of
its duties the Home Secretary may hold an inquiry, and by order
require the local authority to remedy the default, when it may be also
ordered to pay the expenses of such inquiry.
The duties of the Local Education Authority include the following:—
(a) Ascertaining what children within their area are defective
within the meaning of the Act.
(b) Ascertaining which of such children are incapable, by reason
of mental defect, of receiving benefit or further benefit from
instruction in special schools or classes.
(c) Notifying the names and addresses of the children indicated
in the above paragraph, to the committee for the care of the
mentally defective, and also notifying those children who on or
before attaining the age of sixteen are about to be discharged from
a special school, and in whose case the local education authority are
of opinion that it would be to their benefit that they should be sent
to an institution or placed under guardianship.
methods of putting a defective under control.
There are two ways of doing this:—
(a) By the application of the parent or guardian ;
(b) By the presentation of a petition followed by an order of
the judicial authority, by an order of a Court or by an order of the
Home Secretary.
The procedure is as follows:—
(a) If a defective be an idiot or an imbecile, his parent or guardian
may place him in an institution or under guardianship, on an application
accompanied by a certificate signed by two doctors, one of whom must
be a doctor approved for the purpose by the local authority or the Board
of Control.
If the defective be feeble-minded or a moral imbecile a parent only
can apply, and in this case a judicial authority must sign, in addition to
the two doctors, a certificate that he is satisfied that the person is a
defective and to what class of defectives he belongs.
The managers of the institution for defectives or the person under
whose guardianship he has been placed must give notice of his reception
to the Board of Control within seven days.