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In the years 1937, 1938, and 1939 the grant of £400 to the London Clinic was continued,
and small grants—£50 and £100—were made to five other clinics. These grants, which
bore no relation to the costs of treatment, could not be regarded as anything more than
tokens of the Council's formal recognition of the clinics as school treatment centres.
It will be apparent that whilst the Council co-operated with the Child Guidance Council
from the inception of the movement, its policy up to 1939 had been marked by extreme
caution. Child guidance had been imported with very little modification from America,
and it was questioned whether its range and technique fitted in as well as in some parts
of that country with the other provisions for children which had already been made here,
both by local authorities and voluntary bodies.
(d) References for child guidance in 1938—As an illustration of the numbers and types
of cases which were referred officially by the Council for child guidance before the war,
the following table gives an analysis of the reasons for which children were referred to
clinics during 1938:
Behaviour difficulties 230 Speech difficulties 56
Nervousness 190 Temper tantrums 45
Backwardness 156 Truancy 37
Stealing 127 Sex difficulties 49
Enuresis 113 Fits 35
Night terrors and fears 61 Other reasons 90
Intelligence testing 58
Total 1,247
It is noteworthy that the backwardness and stealing that headed the list in 1931 have
been replaced by behaviour difficulties and nervousness. The very wide range of difficulties
with which the pre-war clinics concerned themselves is also reflected. Many of these cases
would, today, be dealt with in other ways.
(e) The 'Feversham' Report—As early as 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. In
the event, with the help of the Commonwealth Fund, a joint committee of five of the
principal societies was founded under the lay chairmanship of Lord Feversham. This
Committee undertook to review the provisions of mental health services and to make
suggestions for eventually bringing together all the voluntary services concerned in the
United Kingdom. The Committee issued a comprehensive and valuable report in 1939,
in which a scheme was formulated for the amalgamation of the principal voluntary
societies.
They remarked that at first the child guidance clinics had dealt with every type of
behaviour difficulty in children. This they attributed to the aptness generally of the
supporters of any new school of therapeutics to be overenthusiastic, and particularly to
take too seriously every minor abnormality in a child's reactions. There was a danger lest
incursion into the normal provinces of the teacher and the family doctor might bring the
child guidance movement into disrepute, and they called attention to the difficulty of
estimating the results of child guidance methods so long as clinics dealt with children who
were fundamentally normal.
These views led the Committee to the concept of a more careful selection of cases
referred for child guidance treatment, which would probably encourage teachers and
others to bring to notice children who had presented problems of abnormality in behaviour
or educability. Some of these cases would merely constitute problems of simple training
or discipline and the kind of guidance required for these cases was, in the opinion of the
Feversham Committee, part and parcel of the education system, and a matter for an
educational psychologist. The Committee recommended that every local education
authority should, when possible, appoint a psychologist to advise them on their educational
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