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No statutory Welfare schemes can work satisfactorily without the valued help of voluntary
organisations and voluntary helpers and the same applies in reverse. To them are due our best
thanks and appreciation for the effort they make and the time they give in the service of those
unable to be entirely independent.
B.A.Warshaw
Chief Welfare Officer
Special Education
Waltham Forest, as the local Education Authority, has had the good fortune to inherit,
from its constituent boroughs, a most comprehensive (to use the work in a strictly non-controversial
sense) range of schools. The Grammar and Technical Schools enjoyed a much more than local
reputation and drew a fair proportion of their pupils from other, less well endowed, boroughs. At
the other end of the scale came the Special Schools for the mentally and physically handicapped
while in between were the large number of progressive and aspiring secondary modern schools
providing educational opportunities for about 80% of the boys and girls of the Borough. How great
these opportunities were may be gauged by the fact that two Ministers in the present Government
(The Rt..Hon.Arthur Botto-nley and Mr.E. G Redhead, M.P., J.P.) both received their education in
Walthamstow schools and were successively Aldermen and Mayors of the Borough.
Alas! Not all our schoolchildren have a Chancellor's Budget Box in their satchels- many
are predestined from birth to severely limited attainment and it is, not unnaturally, this group of
children with which the School Medical Officer is most closely concerned since they are the ones
most in need of help if they are to develop even their limited powers to the best advantage. Like
a convoy of ships, a class at school tends to be held back by the slowest individual and the
transfer of a child who is obviously out of his depth to a special class or special school, suited
to his particular handicap, not only benefits him by placing him in a small class with the services
of a specially trained and experienced teacher who has time to give the individual guidance he
needs but, by removing the "lame duck", it enables his old class to proceed at a faster pace and
this is vitally important nowadays. Advances in the pure and applied sciences are leading us to
a pushbutton civilisation where automation and computer control will leave no place for the semiskilled
worker — one must either be a technologist or a tea-boy. Already, prefabricated compression
joints and polythene piping are extinguishing the apprenticeship trained plumber with his
blow-lamp. Never before was there so much to learn, so much to cram into the ten or twelve years
between entering an infants' school and leaving with those '0' or 'A' levels which are vital for
those aspiring to obtain professional qualifications.
It is most welcome news, therefore, that more special classes are to be started and the
Borough's Special Schools for the educationally sub-normal are to be integrated so that the
Margaret Brearley School can concentrate on the junior children while the Harrow Green School
will take the seniors. There will thus be more children of a given age and ability grouping at
each school enabling classes to be formed with a more uniform standard of ability and attainment:
The more homogenous a class the less teacher-time consuming individual attention is needed.
The two departments of the Leyton E.S. N. School (Seniors at Harrow Green, Juniors at
Leyton Green) cater for a total of 170 children while there were 106 at Margaret Brearley School
at the end of the year. In addition to these, 57 children were accommodated in four special
classes which cater specifically for children who are inhibited, immature or show specific
retardation in one aspect of learning. These classes are primarily remedial and aim to return the
majority of their children to the normal educational stream — only those failing to respond being
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