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or temporary erections established and equipped and staffed for different
age groups of children. The main difficulty to be contended with will
be the provision of convenient lavatory accommodation, and it is recommended
that your Committee should take into consideration the means
whereby it may be overcome.
School for Physically Defective Children:—The provision of a
school for defective children has for many years engaged the attention
of your Committee, and but for the war a building would have been
erected to meet the requirements of these unfortunate children. As
a. tentative measure it was purposed to open a cripple class at Parkhurst
Road school, and negotiations were entered upon with the Council
for the conveyance of cripple children to and from school try means of
their fleet of ambulances. An alternative proposition was entertained,
namely, the purchase of ambulances for school purposes only. The
latter alternative has much to commend it, and as the scheme develops,
may prove to be a necessity. Much will depend upon the class or
classes of cripples for whom education is to be provided. Perhaps
the greatest number of these children will be sufferers from the effects
of Infantile Paralysis and Tubercular disease of bones and joints. Both
classes require, as a rule, prolonged surgical treatment; nor necessarily
of an operative kind, but rather the frequent adaptation of instruments
or other appliances suitable to the patients and their maladies. Their
disabilities are likely to extend over a period of years—years when,
for lack of the physical exertions appropriate to children of their age,
their minds ought to be engaged, not only to equip them better for their
battle in life, but to divert their minds from their afflicted bodies.
The claims of cripple children have not been sufficiently insisted upon
with the result that institutions for their special needs are exceedingly
few. Institutions of the kind at Arton, Lord Mayor Treloar's Home tor
Cripple Children, ought to be available for the unfortunates of every
locality, and in the development of a scheme for cripple children, that
Institution might fittingly be considered as the type to which others should
conform. That Institution is mainly intended for Tuberculous children,
so 'that it would be necessary to add an orthopaedic department for
sufferers from Infantile Paralysis or other crippling ailments or deformities.
Your Committee's program in relation to school provision for
defectives is as yet incomplete, and consideration might profitably be
given to the question whether a complete equipment could not be
arranged in conjunction with a hospital scheme, and if it was likely to
prove prohibitively costly in association with other progressive authonties.