View report page

REPORT ON THE SCHOOL HEALTH SERVICE
DURING THE YEAR 1958.
To the Chairman and Members of the Bexley Committee
for Education.
Mr. Chairman Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have the honour to submit my Annual Report on the
School Health Service for the year 1958, the twelfth which
it has been my privilege to present.
The golden jubilee of the School Health Service fell in
December 1957, and a retrospective glance may, therefore,
not be out of place. The service was brought into being by
the Education (Administrative Provisions) Act, 1907 following
the report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical
Deterioration in 1904, the latter having been appointed by
the Privy Council in 1903 to investigate the allegation that
40 to 60 per cent of the Army recruits were physically unfit
for military service. It is a matter of history that the Interdepartmental
Committee carried out its task with such extraordinary
thoroughness and vision that their recommendations
laid the foundations of much of the practice of social medicine
as we understand it today. The Act of 1907 imposed
on local education authorities the duty to provide for the
medical examination of children in public elementary schools
and to attend to their health and physical condition. From
the beginning it was made clear that this service also aimed
at the mental and moral improvement of coming generations.
This is the spirit which has animated the School Health
Service during the past 50 years so that, not only is it concerned
with the discovery of defects and their treatment and
with the prevention of ill-health, but with the promotion of
the physical mental and emotional development of the child.
It is, therefore, fully identified with the aims of education
as a whole of which it is an integral part. These are, as I
see it, to help the schoolchild by the cultivation of his body
and his mind to realise the full promise of his genetic endowment
and, as far as we are concerned, to assist him to overcome
the physical, mental and psychological difficulties which
he will encounter on the road to maturity and social integration.
The health of the schoolchild has improved out of all
knowledge in the past half-century. The death rate per 1,000
54