Among the features of the Supplementary Estimate which we all welcome is a new provision in respect of the College of Physical Education. The fact that we are being asked to provide money for this college is the first concrete sign of activity here. We are delighted to see this development getting under way. The Minister will recall I had occasion to raise in the House some time ago the problems that will arise in the interim period. The Minister, very properly seeking to make provision for the training of males in physical education, has made financial provisions to enable them to be trained in Britain, but this has produced a situation where the girls are in fact at a disadvantage because they are not getting the same assistance.
It does seem a pity to leapfrog in this way and while it was clearly necessary to make special provision for the men, made generously it must be said, pending the establishment of the college, it should be matched by an equal provision in the case of girls who should not be at a financial disadvantage during the interim period. I would ask the Minister to have another look at this, because the costs involved would be short term and that kind of discrimination is adding fuel to certain flames which are already burning in various areas and it seems to me to be undesirable to add to them in this way.
In regard to university grants I am not clear from what the Minister has said how much is in fact being provided to meet the cost of the twelfth round salary increases and how much is being provided to compensate for part of the cost of increased fees. When the Minister is replying perhaps he will tell us the relative proportion involved in these two headings which appear to account for the great bulk of additional expenditure in respect of general grants for universities.
I notice in the main Estimate for this year, and no doubt Deputy Thornley will raise the matter, that Trinity College got a very small increase in its general grant but it now gets a disproportionately large increase in this Supplementary Estimate. The net effect of the two is to give Trinity College increases broadly in line with those of the other universities but I wonder what the reason was for not giving them their due in the first instance.
We are at a disadvantage in that the Supplementary Estimate contains all kinds of apparent anomalies which are always easily explained, but we do not get an explanation and a fuller presentation might be helpful. Other Ministers have adopted the procedure of circulating fairly full statements accompanying their speeches rather than integrated into them. We have it in Transport and Power and Agriculture and Fisheries and this enables the Minister to explain much detail which would be out of place in his speech but which the Dáil is entitled to have information about. On previous occasions I have pressed the Minister to produce a White Paper on education generally which is long overdue and as another part of the process of information perhaps he would consider, when he comes to his main Estimate speech, preparing a full statement on the expenditure for the year ahead giving us the kind of details which I think we are entitled to but with which he would not want to clutter up his main speech.
I should like to ask the Minister, although I think I know the answer, what the position will be in the Book of Estimates as regards the universities. Am I right in taking it, as we have not yet established the Higher Education Authority, although we hope to do so in the very near future, that the presentation for the grants for universities this year will be in the traditional form and in the following year we will get the new presentation for the grant to the HEA? As the legislation is not through yet it is inevitable it should take the old shape this year but we look forward to seeing the new presentation in the following Estimates showing us that the HEA is in full swing and doing its job.
The big item in all these Estimates is teachers' salaries and none of us will begrudge these increases. The Minister has had a difficult year trying to sort out the problem. We are all glad it has proved possible to get to the stage we have got to, of at least avoiding a strike, but the Minister knows the problem is not totally solved. It has been resolved for the time being but there remain difficulties to be ironed out and as we see from recent developments in the ASTI there remains a lingering sense of frustration which could be a source of danger to the settlement reached. It is important that the procedures the Minister has been able to establish should get working and that channels for dealing with these frustrations should be created, channels which have become clogged up because of the dispute which has arisen and because of the circumstances giving rise to the dispute. The sooner channels of conciliation and arbitration acceptable to the different teaching bodies are being used, the sooner we shall reach the stage where we can breathe freely again without having another strike descending upon us from one or other of these three Olympian heights.
The big problem here is the promotional problem. I must say I am not clear as to where we have got to. The last we heard from the Minister on this was the partially satisfactory statement that progress has been made with many of the religious orders in this matter but in certain sectors, some of the teaching brothers I think it was, agreement had not been reached with regard to the provision of adequate promotional outlets. Can the Minister tell us if progress has since been made in this respect? Clearly the lack of adequate promotional outlets in our educational system, particularly in the secondary sector, is one of the main problems and we are, indeed, now paying a rather high price for this because the frustration that has built up has given rise to disputes which have had to be settled fairly expensively, and which could have been settled more peacefully and, in some respects, less expensively if we had not had this problem and if normal promotional outlets had existed. It is clear we have these difficulties which have to be resolved.
This is a country in which religious orders have played an enormous role in education. They will continue to do so in the years ahead. Most people, certainly at this stage, want their children in secondary schools to be educated in the traditional way in schools which are run mainly by religious orders and the work of these orders will continue. But its smooth continuance and the smooth relationship between Church and State, which we would all like to see, depends on a settlement being reached which will assure teachers of promotional outlets to which they are entitled. I think there has been a great change in thinking on the part of the religious orders. There was a time when too many of them took the view that the schools were their schools; they should manage and control them, hold the principalships and vice-principalships, and the lay teachers were simply there to serve. That attitude has diminished and there has been a growing recognition on the part of the religious orders that this is unwise and undesirable in the main and liable to lead to a very unsatisfactory situation. The Minister has the job of ensuring that this recognition becomes widespread and I should like to hear from him what progress there has been and, in precise terms, what has been agreed. We are, I think, entitled to more than vague assurances that goodwill has been shown. What agreement has been reached and with whom? With whom has it not been reached? Is there still some area where there is an obstacle and where the possibility of teachers getting promotion to the highest level is not open to them? What does the Minister think can be done to ensure that the goodwill being shown by so many of the religious orders in this respect will be shown by all of them? We are, I think, entitled to hear about this because this is a matter which is liable to give rise to difficulties in the period ahead if it is not adequately settled.
I want now to come to subhead A. 1 relating to training colleges. In September, 1970, the Higher Education Authority produced its report on teacher education. This report is unsatisfactory. I am sorry to say this because I had hoped the authority would make a breakthrough in this area. What I find unsatisfactory is not only that I disagree with the conclusion which is a familiar position in which I find myself in regard to many reports, but the conclusion is at variance with the premises. In section 2 of the report there is an extensive quotation from the findings of a group of educationalists in various countries, a group set up by a committee of the Council of Europe for higher education and research; the findings of this group are quoted in a footnote, as if they were accepted and formed the basis of the Higher Education Authority's recommendations, but their recommendations actually fly in the face of the views of the Council of Europe in this respect. The very last clause in these findings, clause (d), is as follows:
Whereas some universities may be organised with a special accent on teacher training and educational research, isolated educational universities are not recommended because they would run the risk of becoming cut off from developments in other fields of scholarship, research and professional training.
These are wise words and we should heed them. The Higher Education Authority, having recorded these words, did not heed them and has in fact proposed to cut off the training college in a separate sector, producing teachers who would have a special degree, BEDSc, Bachelor of Educational Science, on a three-year course, which would include practical training in teaching.
This proposal has a number of disadvantages. The first is pointed out by the Council: such bodies would be cut off from developments in other fields of scholarship, research and professional training. This is not giving to teachers a university education. It is elevating somewhat the existing training colleges and extending the length of the course. The students will still be cut off in separate institutions, segregated from secondary teachers and the great body of vocational teachers doing university studies with a view to acquiring a Higher Diploma in Education for the purpose of teaching in these areas. The report talks about this as bringing the aim of a unified teaching profession a step nearer. Here, we are at a stage at which the Minister has been for two years battling to secure a unified teaching profession, has met with great difficulties in this, has overcome them for the time being, at least, and all the Higher Education Authority can offer is something that will bring us a step nearer something we had thought the Minister was in process of procuring. If you continue to hive off primary teachers and keep them in separate institutions, segregating them there and giving them a three-year course, with practical training, whereas secondary teachers will have three years at university, followed by a year of practice, to talk about a unified profession is just nonsense. It will not be unified and you cannot expect vocational and secondary teachers to accept that it is a unified profession. We have been fighting to get that. Why undermine the whole situation now by making a change so inadequate as to highlight the continued divergence between their system of training and education and that of other teachers?
This proposal is quite inadequate. It is, I understand, unacceptable to some at least, if not all, of the teacher training colleges. In at least one case it greatly underestimates the potential of that college—the case of St. Patrick's Training College, where you already have a research activity being carried on of a university character, an activity indeed with which any university would be proud to be associated. You have there a college which over a relatively short period of years could become a university college, accepted as such with its degrees accepted by universities generally here and elsewhere. It seems to me that the Minister, if he accepts this proposal, and I hope he will not, will be doing damage in a number of different ways. He will be preventing primary teachers from securing the same kind of training and education at the same level as secondary and vocational teachers and he will be seen to be doing so. As well as that, these teachers will be seen as not having a similar educational qualification. He will be placing an obstacle in the way of a unified teaching profession and underestimating the potential of some of these institutions.
In the Fine Gael policy of five years ago we put forward quite clearly our views on this subject. We have not changed them. They were put forward in some degree tentatively, because it was the first time this question had been tackled and we did not feel we should be unduly dogmatic about particular solutions. But the solution we put forward was one under which primary teachers, like other teachers, would get a university degree in a university institution not confined to teachers, and would proceed thereafter to a further year, which would be equivalent to the Higher Diploma in Education, in which they would complete their training in the theory and practice of education. We suggested it would be desirable that people intending to become teachers would, during the period of their university course, undertake some additional course in the theory and practice of education.
Indeed, what we had in mind was that on the practical side it would be possible for them to get some experience during the holiday periods instead of going to a pea-canning factory in Britain. We suggested, however, that if they were undertaking an honours degree in those circumstances this extra load, concurrent with their ordinary university course, should not be imposed on them because this would create difficulties in the completion of their honours degree. You would have two streams of primary teachers coming forward, both of whom would continue on them to the additional year, one of whom would have had some training in the theory and practice of education during their university general degree course, the other of whom would not have had but would have specialised in particular subjects and reached a very high level and would compensate in their subject orientation for what they might lack in their pupil orientation. In the final year, because of their calibre as honours students, they would more readily catch up on any backlog on their part in the theory and practice of education.
There are different ways one can work this. We are not being dogmatic about the particular solution but what is evident is that we simply cannot accept at this stage, and we will not accept may I say to the Minister, on this side of the House that teacher training should continue to be segregated and any attempt to whitewash it and make it look as if it is for primary teachers the same as for secondary and vocational teachers is not acceptable. At this stage we want a unified teaching profession. We have supported the Minister in this.
We have, as the Minister knows, at no stage made any party capital out of the difficulties the Minister has faced. We have worked quietly behind the scenes to try to get this dispute settled but having done that loyally and tried to help in this situation at every stage, we think we are entitled to say that what has been achieved to date in preserving the principle of a unified teaching profession as the objective to aim at should not be prejudiced by any step which would be such a half step as to undermine the possibility of having a unified teaching profession.
Our position, therefore, is clear on this. We are not prepared to accept proposals along the lines of the Higher Education Authority report. I believe this is true of some at least of the teacher training colleges. They are not prepared to accept them either and the Minister should beware therefore of accepting a recommendation which does not have the necessary support. As far as we are concerned when we get the opportunity to deal with this problem we intend to deal with it along the lines that I have suggested and it would be a mistake for the Minister at this stage to proceed to any interim arrangement which would have to be adjusted when this party get the opportunity of making that adjustment.
I would ask the Minister, therefore, to think very seriously about this report from the HEA and to take very seriously the view of the teacher training colleges themselves on this matter. I see difficulties, as I have said before, in overnight turning all those teacher training colleges into university colleges. This may not be the answer. The answer may lie in the different kind of structure in which some of them become full university colleges with a range of subjects. They may not have the same range initially as existing universities but they could have a range of relevant subjects taught to university level and with a body of research being carried on in them equivalent to what is carried on in the university. Others of the colleges might in fact be used to fulfil the role of the training college, providing the additional year at the end of the university course.
There is no reason why all of those colleges should have to fulfil the same role.
The proposal put forward is one which in fact would make them into a kind of half university colleges, which underestimates the potential of some and which does not provide a satisfactory solution. I would urge the Minister, therefore, not to accept the dangerously simplified solution put forward here and instead to consider seriously the kind of proposals outlined in our policy, to which a lot of thought was given and which I think has stood the test of time. In the past five years the evolution of thinking in the teacher-training colleges themselves has been in the direction of our proposal. I think our proposal was ahead of its time. It did not secure at that time the support of the teacher-training colleges. Some at least accepted it as a possible solution but they did not I think feel it was necessarily the best solution. I think opinion has come around towards our view since then. I think, and hope, that we have played some part in that and that we have helped constructively to lead opinion towards the kind of solution which would be in advance of other countries, because I recognise that in other countries still teacher training is segregated off in training colleges separate from universities. We are in the happy position that for most of our teachers already this is not the case. For two groups of teachers this is not the case already and for the primary teachers it would not require an enormously expensive adjustment to bridge the gap between the present system and the university system.
I have pointed out before that the cost of a university general degree in particular in this country is relatively low. In fact it is quite extraordinarily low, partly because of the inadequate teacher/student ratio it must be said and, on the other hand, the cost of the training colleges has been relatively high because of their residential character. In those circumstances for us to move from a segregated residential training college system to one in which the primary teachers would get a university education followed by a year's specialised teacher training would not necessarily increase costs. We are in the happy position that we are able at this point to make the transition to a much more advanced system than other countries have at very limited cost. We should not fail to grasp this opportunity.
I would like to say a couple of words on the subject of school attendance arising out of Subhead C. 8 in the Primary Education Vote—Special Educational Project. All of us will watch with interest this project and what results come from it. It is, of course, frustratingly long-term in character. Quite rightly, because of its very nature, it is spread over a period of years. Its results could only be of value if they were secured in this way but it is frustrating that we have to wait to see the results of this experiment. I do not think we need to wait for the results of this experiment to introduce many changes, reforms and improvements in our educational system especially in areas like the City of Dublin, especially in the great suburban sprawls and in the centre city areas.
We have very severe problems here which I do not think have ever had adequately the attention of the Department or of the Minister for Education. In this country the strongest political pressures come from rural Ireland. There are very good reasons why this is the case and why this should be the case. Indeed many social problems are greater in rural Ireland. Certainly the problems of employment are greater there. I speak for the moment as a Dublin TD in this respect. All of us in Dublin accept that there must be a bias towards rural Ireland in much of our legislation but there are two areas where the bias should be the other way because there are social problems so acute in the city and less acute in rural Ireland that they require special attention. Those are housing and education, and in particular primary and vocational education. I do not think the secondary education situation creates special problems in the cities. On the contrary density of population there provides greater variety of choice and in fact secondary education probably is in a better position than in rural Ireland but there are problems of vocational and primary education in the city that have never adequately been tackled.
It is most disturbing to hear from the Minister, as we have heard recently in reply to a question, the figures for the size of classes in Dublin primary schools. Those figures, as far as I can judge, show a deterioration not an improvement. After years of the process of closing down small schools which was designed in the Investment in Education policy, among other things, to release hundreds of teachers for urban areas with a view to bringing down the pupil/teacher ratio, we have made no apparent progress. I do not understand why this should be so. The Minister ought to give us full data on this. We need some kind of flow diagram which would show us as between say 1965 and 1970 what has happened, what have been the changes in the number of pupils in the major urban and rural areas. What have been the changes in the number of pupils in the major and rural areas? What have been the changes in the number of teachers? How have these changes in the numbers of teachers come about? Have teachers been transferred from rural to urban areas? Has there been a non-replacement of teachers in rural areas? To what extent have newly-trained teachers been diverted? What has been the flow of teachers and what has been the result? How is it that after some years of a policy allegedly directed towards improving the appalling teacher/pupil ratio in the schools in the cities, especially in Dublin, we seem to be no better off and possibly are worse off in this respect? The size of classes at this stage is an absolute scandal and an intolerable scandal because it is something which it must be in our power to remedy. We simply cannot accept that a situation in which the teacher/pupil ratios are totally different in different parts of the country must continue.
One sees that changes must be made gradually. One accepts it takes some years to reorientate our teaching force to where it is most needed. However, we have had some years and we have not had results. The Minister ought to tell us why this is and I would ask him again to be much freer here in the provision of information. His development branch, as originally envisaged, was one which was to produce a flow of information available to everybody, to teachers, school managers, to the Opposition, to everybody who wanted the information, instead of which it seems to be working away behind closed doors. No access to it is available to any of the people I have mentioned. It is under tight administrative control. It is not the professional unit it was meant to be and in the meantime we are deprived of adequate information on the educational system. We are simply not getting the flow of statistics.
In Investment in Education we got a glimpse, a snapshot of a moment in time, of our educational system and when we saw what the flaws and problems were and what needed to be done to resolve them the book was hastily shut and we have not seen it opened since. All we can do occasionally by the frustrating process of Parliamentary Question is to get the odd page reprinted and updated, but we do not have a picture of where we stand in our educational system at the moment. We need that picture and in particular we need to know why we are not making progress in the cities and especially in Dublin. The problems here are immense and I would commend to the Minister a very important paper read last night in the city at a symposium on school attendance organised by Dublin Corporation in a very valuable and imaginative gesture. It was a meeting which was extremely well attended and at which the contributions were at a very high level. Because of my commitments in the House I was not able to get there until towards the end of the meeting. I did not hear the paper read but I did get a copy of it and have been reading it. I commend it to the Minister because there are facts put forward in this paper as a result of research carried out in this sphere by Dr. McQuaid, a psychiatrist, which are profoundly disturbing and which ought to influence very seriously the Department's policy and attitude. I wish to mention a few of the points that emerge from this paper:
A particular problem in recent years has been the association between school non-attendance and residence of the family in the high rise apartments in Ballymun.
I just mention that because I am extremely disturbed at the attitude of officials on this whole question of Ballymun. Ballymun was an error in social planning. We all make mistakes and we know errors can be made in social planning, but the attitude of this Government and indeed of the Public Service of never admitting a mistake is most dangerous. I had the experience recently of discussing this with very senior officials of Dublin Corporation and their attitude was that Ballymun was a howling success, that it was an absolute lie to say it was not a success. Every public representative in this city knows that people will not go to Ballymun, that the people who are there want to get out of it, that it was designed according to middle-class prejudices and is totally unsuited to the people for whom it was provided. It has been a serious social blunder.
Let us accept it was a mistake made in good faith by a Government anxious to get something done about housing but let us face the mistake, and here is a concrete fact, the emergence among many other social evils that Bullymun has created of a school attendance problem because of the psychiatric and social problems created by putting people into conditions which are totally unsuited to them, when they were used to a different environment altogether, a gregarious environment, and locking them away in these little boxes 17 storeys up and in many cases literally driving them mad as a result.
There are other points that emerge from this research. There are such things as the stratification of education in certain areas of the city, the preselection from the convent school before allocation of places, which would appear to indicate that the better boys are selected from the convent school for one type of school and the remainder go to a school run by a different religious order. This has very great significance in terms of expectations and built-in predictions for the children by the responsible school authorities.
Another point that emerges is that of a small number of children, approximately 25, fully assessed and placed in a special school, 15 cases eventually had to be discharged from the special school because they were unacceptable by virtue of abnormal behaviour. These children eventually returned to the school from which they had originally come and for which they had originally been found totally unacceptable. If we create a system to cope with children who, because of their environment, do not fit into a normal school, there is something very wrong if we provide a special school for them and the special school then rejects them as being abnormal and sends them back to the school they came from. Clearly the system is breaking down when that kind of situation arises. There is then a sentence which sums up the Dublin situation in terms which certainly strike home to me:
It can hardly be denied that to come from an understimulating, underprivileged and deprived home where there are perhaps large numbers of children competing for limited emotional and material fulfilment, that to go to a situation where there is little of attraction, an expectation to remain still and listen to an individual from an alien social class with alien cultural ideals and expectations of children, often coupled with a lack of individual contact, an attempt to realistically assist the child in developing some competence in educational tasks is asking too much of the child in question.
There is a problem which the Minister needs to consider. Owing to the way in which our primary teachers have been drawn in the past, as to 85 per cent from seven counties in the West of Ireland and owing to the imposition on children in Dublin of the whole system of Irish language teaching which to them means nothing, which to them is an alien cultural system altogether, the combination of having teachers from a different cultural environment who clearly in many cases have difficulty in understanding the children of the area and the Irish language problem is simply to recreate a colonial-type situation. I do commend to the Minister that remarkable paper on social mobility in Dublin, which made it clear that there is no social mobility in Dublin for children of manual-working parents. There has been no social mobility because they are in fact colonised and re-colonised in each generation, taught by people from an alien cultural environment and taught a culture which to them is alien, which means nothing, and as a result of which when they leave school they are in a very high proportion of cases not literate, incapable of coping and simply exported as fodder to the British labour market. This is the type of situation which if it existed in a colony would be regarded as totally unacceptable and the United Nations would do something about it, but because it happens in Ireland, in our own country, and because we do not recognise these subcultures as existing and take the over-simplified view that we are all of the same culture in this country we are doing nothing about it. There is a very real problem here. There is an oppressed subculture in Dublin whose only outlet is to emigrate without any qualifications, without any adequate education or training.
This is now changing. Great work is being done. In many of our schools now, and particularly in many of the vocational schools, great work is being done in trying to achieve a breakthrough. There are vocational schools in particular that are managing to get children from very underprivileged homes right through into Kevin Street and Bolton Street and into the university. A real breakthrough is being made for the first time, but we have for half a century allowed this colonial-type of situation to exist and have done nothing about it. It is only in recent years that the problem has been tackled. There is an immense educational problem in Dublin, a problem of impossibly large classes in the primary schools, a problem of inadequate places in the vocational schools. I was in a vocational school this morning where the principal told me he has to turn away two to three times as many pupils as he can take. This is a school which is doing remarkable work and yet pupils have to be turned away because there is no accommodation for them there. We need to reconsider our whole attitude on this subject.
I want to say something about community schools and I want to conclude fairly soon to leave time for another speaker. The Department's document on community schools has come in for a great deal of publicity. It is most unfortunate that its provenance was never explained until the Fianna Fáil Ard-Fheis. Very belatedly the Minister did concur with my account of its origins. There is far too much controversy and heat in this country at present but much of the heat would have been avoided if it had been made known at the beginning that this document was produced as a guide to thinking in a particular instance when a particular bishop wanted to know in respect of a particular problem in a particular town what was the Department's thinking. If secondary schools in particular had been told that that was the origin of the document, a lot of the suspicions that arose as to what the Department were up to in sending documents to the hierarchy and not to them, would not have been aroused. I am glad that I am able to contribute now to the clarification of this document.
The document itself is interesting and is worthy of serious consideration. The Minister knows I have not accepted the view put forward by some people that this is an attempt to destroy our religious system of education. I have not rallied to the flag of revolt that has been raised by some people because we gain nothing by discussing these problems in emotional terms. This proposal in relation to community schools deserves mature and responsible consideration but what bothers me about it is the inadequacy of the statement put forward. I am not saying that I am opposed to community schools but I will say that there are difficulties in relation to the creation of the kind of community schools envisaged here—difficulties that are better faced up to than swept under the carpet. No service is done to education by producing a document which, after reading it, one would think there was no such thing in Ireland as religious education. There is religious education and there is a problem between two co-existing systems of education one of which is—I shall not say secular— non-sectarian, the vocational system. This system is run by the State. We have had it now for 40 years and it has worked well. I have not heard many complaints in relation to the religious faith of either the majority or the minority being adversely affected by these schools. We also have the secondary stream which is predominantly religious.
Parents who send their children to these schools do so, among other reasons, because they are concerned that their children should have the same kind of religious background as they themselves have. This is a deep-rooted instinct among Irish people. It is true that, owing to the way the two systems have originated, there is considerable class division between them and we have the rather curious position where, by and large, a middle class who, themselves, were educated in religious schools, send their children to religious schools, whereas the children of manual workers have found, until recently, that their opportunity for education lay in a different system —in a system that was non-sectarian. This tended to differentiate our two cultures even further. I have never understood why there should be so much heat about this just as I have never understood why it should be all right for the children of manual workers to attend non-sectarian schools while there were grave moral dangers attaching to children from middle-class homes in attending these schools and so they were sent to religious schools. I could not follow why a child coming from a better off home should be more prone to religious deviation and why it is that the Church felt that the children coming from workingclass homes did not matter so much.
Having said all that, the document produced by the Minister's Department does not face the problem. There is a problem and it is not going to be resolved easily. Clearly it is desirable for practical reasons, in a number of towns in this country, that we should have some merger of schools at the post-primary level. I do not concur with the figures in the Minister's document. In a country of low density of population, I am sceptical of setting targets of 800 pupils with a minimum of 400. Quite apart from the problems associated with achieving this in most parts of the country, I would accept that there are counter arguments here. The Minister knows that I supported the Government in the small schools controversy. I accepted that one- and two-teacher schools, whatever advantages they might have from a social point of view, were clearly a mistake from an educational point of view. However, at the secondary level I am not convinced that this argument applies with the same force in a secondary school up to 150 pupils. There is a lot to be said for having, as well as large schools, single stream schools of about 250 pupils and about 10 classes including the primary stage running all the way up with one single class at each level.
Of course one accepts that this limits the choice of subjects in that school but we can go overboard in trying, within every school, to give every choice of all possible subjects. In the first place, children are flexible to some extent. As between a number of different languages, for instance, their ability to learn one cannot be very much different from their ability to learn another. Secondly, parents are capable of selecting a school on the basis of the range of subjects available within that school. A solution based on two schools each having up to 250 pupils and each having a different range of subjects would be quite acceptable. I do not see why it should be necessary to put the two together so that there is a wider range of subjects in one school.
