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126
This is always explained to parents on admission. Bu! although the
compulsory leaving age is sixteen exceptions have been made in
cases where a child who is over fifteen years of age is offered a
suitable job or the opportunity to train for one. He may then, if
considered fit, be discharged before the official date rather than
make him stay on and miss the chance of getting settled in suitable
work. Recently, however, there have been instances of parents
insisting that their children leave school at fifteen years of age in
order that they may start earning at the earliest possible moment
even though the proposed work is unsuitable from a medical point of
view. In one extreme case the parents even wished to withdraw a boy
before he was fifteen years old. This situation may become even
more acute if, when the ordinary school leaving age is raised to
sixteen, that for children in special schools rises automatically to
seventeen.
There is another complicating factor resulting from the new
regulations governing school leaving. Previously leavers were
spread out more evenly over the year, now they are concentrated
into two main streams which flood the employment market at Easter
and in July. The handicapped are also caught up in this flood and
now have to take their chance of getting jobs in competition with
all the other normal and younger leavers Previously it had been
possible to place them during slack periods and in-between times.
These remarks apply with even greater force to children leaving the
Cerebral Palsy Unit who may well be unemployable in the ordinary
sense of the word and yet have some small skill which could be
usefully developed. As it is, they may too often remain unemployed
and may stay at home for several months during which time lack of
treatment and of social contacts may undo the work of the school.
The opposite may also occur, as in the case of a boy born on
September 2nd. The dead line date for leaving in the summer being
September 1st, he cannot legally leave school until the following
Easter, when he will be 16Vi years of age.
This problem of the handicapped school leaver is a national
one, and though it is exercising many people's minds, little constructive
help towards its solution has so far been forthcoming. It
is also a long term one involving a change in most parents' attitude
towards their children's handicap and working capacity and also the
provision of more training centres to which they would be glad to
see their children admitted. Ministry, Education Departments, School
Health Services and Youth Employment Officers and employers are
all involved, but none of these groups can act singly and on their
own. Could they not all get together to work out a fair solution? This
seems the only reasonable way of tackling such a problem.