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69
DEFECTIVE, EPILEPTIC, AND BACKWARD
CHILDREN.
In compliance with the Defective and Epileptic Children's
Act, 1903, I was appointed medical examiner for this district
by the Council. One epileptic child has been examined and
sent to a special school. There are several defective children
scattered through the schools, whom, it is hoped, will receive
attention before long.
Under the usual routine of an ordinary elementary
school, these children have no chance of improving or
learning as they should, and often are a serious detriment
to the other members of the class in which they happen to
be. The parents of these children are usually very poor,
often one parent being deficient, so that it is rather a difficult
and costly subject for an Education Authority to deal with.
Especially so in a district like Ilford, which has not a
sufficient number, fortunately, of such children to make it
necessary for special provision to be made by themselves,
but yet a sufficient number to make it costly to send to other
schools. In addition, there are numerous " backward "
children distributed through the various schools—not many
in any particular one, but if you take a dozen in one school,
eight in another, and so on, the total reaches a respectable
figure.
As to what constitutes a "backward" child is open to
discussion. Dr. Kerr takes an arbitrary criterion, that an
ordinary child should be in Standard I. at seven years of
age, and then progress a standard a year until leaving
school.
How it works out in practice is difficult to estimate,
as many teachers do not keep a backward child in the