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caution. Other authorities who had given official recognition more recently to child
guidance had been similarly hesitant to commit themselves very far in this field. Child
guidance, as it had become known in this country up to that time, was imported with
very little modification from America. It was to be questioned whether its range and
technique fitted in as well in this country as in some parts of America with the other
provisions for education and mental health of children which had already been made
in this country by local authorities and voluntary societies.
In 1934 the Child Guidance Council and the National Council for Mental Hygiene
had agreed to explore the possibility of a closer co-ordination between the various
bodies engaged in voluntary mental health work. This led to the formation by five
of the principal societies (with the help of the Commonwealth Fund) of a joint committee
under a lay chairman (Lord Feversham). This Committee undertook to review
the provisions of mental health services and to make suggestions for eventually bringing
together, on a rational basis, all the voluntary services in this particular field in the
United Kingdom. The Committee's Report was issued in 1939 and in it was formulated
a scheme for the amalgamation of the principal voluntary societies. The outcome was
the formation of a new body, the Provisional National Council for Mental Health, in
1943. This amalgamation did not call for any particular action from the Education
Committee in regard to their relations with the Child Guidance Council.
A constant feature of the work of most of the child guidance clinics in London was
the extraordinarily wide range of conditions which were regarded as suitable for their
particular methods of guidance or treatment. As already stated, the Special Services
Sub-Committee observed in 1936 that cases of a kind that did not need the elaborate
technique of child guidance were referred to the clinics, and emphasised the need of
careful selection.
The Feversham Committee in their report remarked that at first the child guidance
clinic dealt with every type of behaviour difficulty in children. 'No doubt,' they said,
'some pioneers of child psychology had been guilty of overstatement and there was a
danger lest incursion into the normal province of the teacher and the family doctor
might bring the child guidance movement into disrepute They also called attention
to the difficulty of estimating the results of child guidance methods so long as clinics
dealt with children who were fundamentally normal but merely reacting to environmental
difficulties.
The types of cases dealt with by the clinics in pre-war years were of great variety.
This variety must have been to some extent due to the diverse channels through which
the children were referred. In 1928 the Council laid down that the School Medical
Officer should select the cases to be referred from the schools. By 1936 the report of the
Special Services Sub-Committee showed that the usual channels of reference for school
cases had become the district organiser of school care committees on requests by head
teachers or the school care committees, presumably with the concurrence of school
doctors carrying out the routine or special medical inspections of the children. In
addition to the cases referred from the schools, however, the clinics were dealing with
other children referred direct to them by various people such as probation officers,
clergymen, family doctors and others. It was not unusual for the clinics to enlist the
help of the care committee organisers in enquiries into school and home environment
and in other ways in dealing with cases not referred to them from the schools.
In 1943, it was suggested by the Education Officer that, since child guidance was
only recognised under the Education Act as a form of school medical treatment, it
seemed important that children should be referred through the school organisation only
on the authority of the School Medical Officer. It was also suggested that it seemed
desirable that the selection of cases should be made on reports of medical practitioners
with special experience of children, such as the assistant (school) medical officers already
in the service of the Council who were approved by the Board of Education for selecting
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