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52
SECTION C.
Infectious Disease.
The figures of absentees during 1945 affecting school attendance
owing to infectious disease are as follows:—
NOTIFIABLE DISEASES.
Cases Contacts
Scarlet Fever 29 28
Diphtheria 3 5
Cerebro Spinal Fever 1 —
Measles 171 Contacts are not excluded
Whooping Cough 10 „
NON-NOTIFIABLE INFECTIOUS DISEASE.
Extracted from returns made by Head Teachers
Mumps 106
Chickenpox 100
STATEMENT ON PHYSICAL EDUCATION, 1945.
General.
In estimating the effects of the recent war conditions on
the physical development of school children, most observers
have limited their investigations to body measurements only
From data supplied by these observers, we are assured that,
weight for weight, and height for height, our children to-day,
contrary to expectations, are every bit as good as their fellows
of pre-war years.
It should be noted, however, that while statistics of this
kind may be taken as evidence of correct or incorrect feeding,
they are no criteria of an individual's state of health or physical
efficiency : thus, from our own observations of the reactions
of school children to their physical training and games lessons,
we would say, quite emphatically, that, compared with their
predecessors of 1939, our children to-day are less active, more
easily fatigued by physical exertion, and certainly far less skilful
in bodily control and management.
Among the higher age-groups in our County Modern
Schools, are many boys who, because of these war-time restrictions
had, until the spring of 1945, never handled a cricket bat
or played a game of football on a grass pitch; boys whose
physical education throughout five and a half years of war had