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101
PHYSICAL TRAINING.
A summary was given in the Report for 1929 of the provision
of organised games for school children and in the Report for 1930
a note was made of new playing fields which had been acquired.
Since then two further playing fields have been acquired, one of
5 acres at Boston Road and another of 9½ acres at Ruislip Road.
The teaching of swimming has been accepted by the Education
Committee as a physical exercise of the best kind and one calling
for every encouragement. Every child has the opportunity of
learning to swim before leaving school and this opportunity is
taken advantage of to an astonishing extent. This is shown by
the fact that at the end of the Summer season last year no fewer
than 233 boys and 258 girls received certificates of proficiency,
a result which is greatly to the credit not only of the swimming
teachers but of the school-teachers who foster the enthusiasm.
OPEN AIR EDUCATION.
It has become the practice of all teachers to accept every
favourable occasion for conducting classes in the open air. It is
part of the instruction of the children in healthy living, and as
the teachers themselves are firm believers in an open air life they
are only too ready at all possible times to encourage the children.
It may be difficult in some of the older schools for most of
the children to benefit from open air instruction, when the weather
is favourable, because of the limited accommodation available
in the playground but in the more recent schools—Stanhope,
Horsenden, Grange Infants' and Wood End, which have been
built of the Derbyshire type—all the children have the opportunity
during both winter and summer of being taught in the open
air. When the Schools were built a little scepticism was expressed
as to the full use which would be made of the facilities for open air
teaching all through the year, but it has been a very agreeable
discovery that the facilities for open air teaching are used so much
as they are.