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75
mental requirements. The children's conveniences are either in the school or
are approached by a covered and sheltered way. In the elementary schools generally
the only conveniences not necessitating a journey across the playground are those
for teachers; boys' urinals have no overhead shelter.
In the nursery school hot water is available, and a child can be bathed if
necessary.
The need for a daily rest for small children is officially recognised, and the
necessary equipment, such as beds and blankets, is provided.
(iii.) Rest.
Every child has a cup of milk in the morning. A mid-day meal is provided
for all children except at the Goldsmith Training College Nursery School, where
a mid-day meal is provided only for necessitous children or those whose parents
prefer them to have the meal in school. (Most of these children are well known
to the College, many of them having attended the College Infant Welfare Centre.)
(iv.) Food.
I he number of children per head of start is smaller in the nursery schools, but
the outstanding feature in the staffing of these schools is that the teachers employed,
whether certificated or not, have had special training in the care and management
of this group of children, whose requirements differ so greatly from those of older
children. Although this special training is not yet available in London at the
Council's training colleges for teachers, the Rachel McMillan Training Centre, the
Goldsmiths' Training College, and the Gyp3y-hill Training College, all in London,
have nursery schools attached to them.
(v.) Staffing.
Open air education.
One of the problems of children's care, particularly in towns, is how to procure
for many of the children a sufficiency of open air and sunlight. This is a particularly
urgent problem in London, with its unprecedented aggregation of population.
Individual children react in varying degree to the deprivation of fresh air and sunlight.
There are marked racial differences. Italians, Jews and Welshmen thrive
and prosper under town conditions, where the blond northerner languishes. Nothing
is more striking to a visitor to an open-air school or convalescent home than the
abnormal preponderance of children of the fair type. Added to this deficiency of
fresh air and sunlight is the deficiency of fresh food, fruit, green vegetables, and
pure untreated milk. Recent research into the causes of deficiency disease in childhood
has emphasised the inter-relationship of sunlight and the mysterious vitamine
constituents of the dietary in their prevention.
Town pallor in the school population of London is recognised as a precursor of
tuberculosis. Perhaps the most fascinating page in the history of children's care in
London is that dealing with the various practical measures which have been
adopted to deal with the school child who begins to flag and becomes listless, to grow
pale and thin and to pine. "You must send him away at once for a month into
the country, mother," is continually on the lips of the hospital physician, advice
which it is too often out of the power of the mother, unaided, to follow.
Many years before the advent of the school medical service, the Children's Country
Holiday Fund sent innumerable London children to the country for a summer
holiday for a fortnight, and the school organisation was always placed fully at their
service for the prosecution of this good work. When war conditions depleted their
resources and limited the number of children to be sent, the authorities of the Fund
sought the help of the school medical service in choosing those children particularly
in need of a holiday from the point of view of health. Year by year, too, the services
of the school nurses have been put at the disposal of the Fund to ensure that the
children going away shall be free from verminous infestation and contagious disease.
The Invalid Children's Aid Association has done and continues to do invaluable
work in sending to convalescent homes London children who require long periods
of country life to restore them to health, but these are chiefly children who have