Last evening I stressed the seemingly all powerful role of the full-time secretariat of the Department of Education. I stressed, in particular, the very influential, dominant role of successive secretaries as distinct from the temporary political heads of the Department. I also stressed the need for a white paper on education and for a permanent select committee of this House on education. I am strongly of the opinion that the children of this nation deserve something more than the power struggle between the politicians, the educational administrators, the churches, the teachers and the parents. We must take education out of the straitjacket into which it has been put.
On the question of community schools, the Minister suggested that his proposals have been deliberately misrepresented by Members of this House and he charged certain Members of this House with playing politics on the subject of education and particularly on the subject of community schools. He wants to know where these Deputies now stand in relation to recent statements by the Catholic Hierarchy on community schools. I want to leave the Minister, the House and the Catholic Hierarchy under no illusions as to my views on this particular subject. I bitterly resent the Minister's charges and I propose now to refute the allegation that we are merely playing politics with community schools. If one wanted to play politics on this issue, all one need have done was to back to the hilt the various power interests involved, thereby leaving the Minister out on a limb. Instead of doing that, we strongly supported the idea of community schools. We differed from the Minister on how this principle should be implemented. That is where we parted company with the Minister.
We welcome the working paper proposed and we endorse the need for a unified post-primary educational system. That is on record. We support the elimination of overlapping and duplication in the provision of teachers. buildings and equipment. We want to see any such duplication ended as quickly as possible. We want to see permanent education in this country, not just sectionalised education, until the age of 18 or 20. We want to see provision made for education for groups of workers and adults generally. The proposals for the community schools were a step in that direction and we supported the broad concept behind the Minister's working document.
Some spokesmen in the churches of this country appear to be under the impression that politicians should not talk so much about education and one gets a reaction from some professional educationalists that politicians should keep out of education. Few people with a liberal and progressive attitude to education think that social and political aspirations can or should be kept out of education. Politicians have the right to point out that the structure of education has a profound effect on the social structure of the country. It has a major impact on the degree of equality of education and on general equality in society. The structure of education has a major impact on the degree of equity in society and it has a profound impact on the degree of social opportunity and social mobility.
I do not think that politicians talk sufficiently about the content and character of education. We are obsessed about the control of education and the conditions of employment of teachers but we neglect to speak about the character and content of education. These influence profoundly the values, the social class structure and standards of an adult society and therefore politicians have every right to be deeply involved and concerned about these aspects of education. They are not the privilege of any teaching order or of any trade union, and they are not the privilege of any managerial group of administrators. The character of education, the social structure and the content of our system are matters that should be discussed by the people.
I would point out that the social structure of education has a profound impact on the demand for education. It is admitted that the primary school system as it exists is, generally speaking, creaking at the seams. Successive Governments have failed miserably to appreciate the fact that unless one has a sound, firm base for education, namely in the primary sector, it is impossible to build the other levels of education. If there is an ineffective or poor system of primary education, inevitably the demand for education and the pool of ability in the pirmary sector will be affected.
Therefore, there is a need for a national attitude towards education. In the past successive generations of parents in effect have told the teaching orders: "It is your responsibility; educate our children for us". As long as the children could get jobs at 17 or 18 years and as long as they were reasonably literate and intelligent, parents were satisfied. Most parents are not deeply concerned and involved in their children's education and I say that as a parent who has children at national school. We have been spoonfed by the religious teaching orders and by the national teachers. They have taken over the responsibility of educating the children and the parents have gladly handed over the educational process, lock, stock and barrel to the parish priest, the school manager, to the local religious orders, and have more or less forgotten their responsibilities after that.
One of the most beneficial and laudable aspects of the community schools proposals was that it was a further democratisation of education. It was a movement towards real comprehensive education in its true sense. It was a reflection of the strong and irresistible pressure of society for a more democratic system of education, for a system in which the citizens would be involved to a greater degree than ever before. In the past half century we have seen the extension of political rights in this country, the extension of rights of personal liberty and the extension of rights with regard to social equality and social welfare. This is beginning to develop slowly in the educational sector.
I wish to assure the Minister and the House that we stand full square behind the demand for the provision of free post-primary education for all children in the State. The Labour Party seek the elimination of all class barriers in education, but many such barriers still exist. We seek the elimination of social barriers in the educational system. We seek the elimination of curricula barriers but many such barriers exist between the different sectors. They have existed between the so-called secondary stream and the so-called vocational stream. That barrier has been bridged, very quickly and correctly.
We want to see the elimination of all the barriers between the various trade unions in the educational field, the barriers between secondary teachers, and primary teachers, and teachers at the university level. It is tragic that the system of education has split the professional teachers into a number of different trade unions when we urgently need a federation of teachers representing all those involved in education. Instead we have had this organisational barrier arising out of the system of education. The secondary teachers are in their own trade union, the vocational teachers are in their own trade union, and the national teachers are in their own trade union, with a consequent divisive approach in the educational field.
Our policy is to have a unified, integrated and democratic post-primary system of education. We have yet to achieve that. The Minister said that we have been playing politics with the community schools. We have not. I was chairman of the Labour Party education committee in 1964, through the general election of 1965, and the general election of 1969. When Deputy FitzGerald took over as the Fine Gael spokesman on education—and thank God Deputy Ryan never got that job —he transformed the Fine Gael policy on education and made it much more progressive. The Labour Party consistently stood for a policy which would provide comprehensive educational facilities in each area, and which would cater for the various aptitudes of the pupils and eliminate duplication of teachers, buildings and equipment at local level.
It was in that setting that we welcomed the first outline proposal on the community schools as published by the Government in October, 1970. We felt that it was an extension of the socialist aspirations of the Labour Party down through the decades. As far back as 1896 James Connolly advocated the public control and management of our national schools. He spoke of free education up to the highest university grades. Twenty years later, speaking about the reconquest of Ireland and the democracy of Ireland he said that among the first of the steps necessary for the regeneration of Ireland must be for Ireland to address itself to the extension of its ownership and administration of the schools of Erin. Whatever safeguards were necessary to ensure that the religious faith of the parents would be respected in the children would surely be adequately looked after by the representatives of a people to whom religion is a vital thing, he said. Connolly's words were quite prophetic. We had to wait for a long while for the Government to bring forward proposals for community schools.
The Government's approach was correct and most welcome. Some Members of the House are like the silent backbenchers of Fianna Fáil on the question of Northern Ireland. They say nothing because, if they speak, they may lose a couple of hundred votes at the next general election. Some Members of the House do not approve of the concept of community schools or comprehensive education. They want the status quo and, given the opportunity, they would defend that opinion quite vigorously.
Deputy Ryan spoke on 12th February of dangerious tendencies in the field of education in Ireland and said they were to be guarded against. He said:
Dangerous tendencies in the filed of education in Ireland need to be guarded against, if educational ends are not to be sacrificed to transient political objectives and administrative convenience.
That was not lauding the introduction of educational changes. According to a supplied script he said:
People must not allow their vision to be clouded by the attachment of emotive labels like "community" or "comprehensive" to structures which bureaucrats seek to impose upon unwilling communities. What is economically justifiable and politically irresistible may sometimes be educationally unsound.
If the Minister wants to have a "go" at any Deputy he has a ready-made target there in Deputy Ryan's attitude to community schools. I suggest that his attitude is conditioned largely by the fact that he is not at one with Deputy FitzGerald in the matter of a liberal approach to education.
It must go on the record that all the reaction does not necessarily come from the Fianna Fáil benches. The most disturbing aspect of the whole approach to the community schools was that it developed in a typically Irish way on the basis of a journalistic scoop. We would never have heard of the behind-closed-doors negotiations on the community schools if it had not been for a journalistic scoop in The Irish Times. It is a rather odd way of developing educational policy, that one has to depend on a document being leaked to a newspaper before one can get down to having a public debate.
The working document on community schools was a scoop which surprised even the Minister for Education. In traditional Fianna Fáil style he reacted to that working document in the now familiar words of the Minister for Transport and Power and a few of his colleagues: "What crisis? What problem?" He said at the Fianna Fáil Ard-Fheis that there was no problem in relation to the religious in education. He said there was no question of the brothers, nuns or priests being asked, much less compelled, to move out of education. He told the Fianna Fáil Ard-Fheis in 1971 that he knew there were some people in some way-out groups who would like this to be so, and who were only too anxious to jump on any bandwagon which they felt would advance their cause. He said there was no question of confiscation of property even though there had been a lot of talk about it.
I think the Minister will agree that that was the beginning of the confusion which started in February, 1971, and worked through last year. That confusion has not yet been cleared up. At that time Deputy FitzGerald pointed out very quickly in Dáil Éireann that great difficulties were involved in the community schools proposals envisaged in the working document. We in the Labour Party also felt that those difficulties could not be swept under the carpet and that they had been ignored by the Minister.
As reported at Column 1719 of the Official Report of 31st March, 1971. Deputy FitzGerald said:
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 ... nonsectarian, the vocational system... We also have the secondary stream which is predominantly religious.
As early as March, 1971, the Minister was fully forewarned of the difficulties facing him in relation to the working document.
This problem of the role of the religious in education was bound to be a topic which would capture public attention. There was a great danger that public discussion of the document would not get further than the emotional arguments. This danger existed in February-March, 1971. I was acutely conscious of it but, somehow or other, things just bumbled on and the thing became a major crisis later on. The whole document, unfortunately, began to get caught up in the classical clash between the Churches' interests and the State. In such a situation the Minister should not have been the least bit surprised to discover that many of the arguments became almost hysterical; some of them became exaggerated, bloated generally, and the merits as to whether or not we should move towards a multidenominational system of education of a comprehensive type or should try to stay in a feudal and authoritarian condition, bound by some kind of Thomistic theological version of education, was lost when the Minister threw the Thomist theologians into the fray and off we went on yet another confrontation which, fortunately, now, 15 months later, is slowly being sorted out, largely to the credit of many of the Opposition Members of the House who have been constructive, helpful and who, above all, have exposed some of the inherent weaknesses in the original community schools document.
The circumstances surrounding the issuing of the working document, therefore, were quite extraordinary. The Minister must accept a great deal of responsibility for being extraordinarily slow in clarifying and publicising the basis of the document. He made one major error. He was seen to be, and in practice actually was, in total prior consultation with the Catholic Hierarchy on the whole question long before he consulted with the other legitimate educational interests. This, again, was a typical departmental, Fianna Fáil, approach.
However, one can say that there are a number of features which perhaps, make the story not as bad as it might seem. It is important to appreciate and to put on record in the House that the working document on community schools was never intended to be published at all. Everybody seems to have missed this point. The document was essentially a private matter between the Department and one Roman Catholic bishop. It was sent to the Catholic Hierarchy for information and in response to a request by the Catholic Hierarchy for information on a particular school case. This needs to be stressed. I would repeat that it was a negotiating document, a working document, between the Department and one bishop and then the Cardinal requested a copy in relation to a particular school case and a copy of the document was sent, I gather, to him. When the Minister was pressed in this House, he replied—column 1737 of the Official Report:
The normal procedure would have been to have full discussions before the matter was made public and then to make it public and to allow anybody else who wished to discuss it to do so.
That was in reply to the charge which we made in this House that other educational interests had not been consulted in relation to the document. He said that the document was prematurely published and, had it not been so, the Minister maintained, at column 1738, we could have had a reasonable and unemotional discussion on the document.
This is the way things developed. It was unfortunate and tragic that that should have been so because it was a disservice to the House and to the public Press that the public Press should have had to depend on a leak in order to advise the National Parliament and the parents of this country as to what was in store for them.
Equally, it should be stressed that there was absolutely nothing in the working document on community schools that had not already been said on many occasions in this House and in the Seanad and in public speeches by the Minister that had already been printed. This is important. I remember when the Vocational Education (Amendment) Act, 1970 was going through the House, enabling vocational education committees to enter into joint management arrangements, it was quite clear that this was the kind of thinking in the Department on the reorganisation of post-primary education, particularly in relation to the management of schools in that area. Yet, despite all those statements from the Minister, up to October, 1970, he had made almost no reference to the concept of community schools as such. So, we had to depend on the leak. Very little has been expressed, particularly about this famous figure of 400 pupils which was to be considered as the minimum size for a post-primary school. These were unusual features, certainly, in the debate.
The third point I would make in relation to the working document is, of course, that it was meant for rural Ireland. It finished up being applied to the suburbs of Dublin city. This is the great irony of the community schools document. The document was essentially, from what we can now gather, one in relation to the rebuilding of post-primary schools in rural areas. The Minister did say on 5th March, 1971, in talks with the Irish Vocational Education Association, that at the moment he was only concerned with 15 school centres where there were particular problems regarding the rebuilding of post-primary schools. At that stage the Minister accepted that the major problem was the provision of capital in those areas and that it would be much more economical for him, the Minister said on that occasion —Michael Heney fully reported it in The Irish Times—to build one central school rather than three or four separate schools with limited capacity.
We accepted that view on the part of the Minister. The community schools document, therefore, envisaged the financial solution to the problem of rebuilding two or three small schools. It was also an educational solution to the problem of the lack of co-ordination and co-operation between secondary and vocational schools in rural areas. We welcome that aspect of the approach of the working document. I am dealing with this at length because the Minister says we are merely playing politics in relation to community schools. The Minister will find that in whole areas of his approach there is very considerable support within the Labour Party for his general attitude. In the light of those statements by the Minister the peculiarities of the document are highlighted. It helps to explain why the document was so concerned with the management system of the schools with almost no effort made to deal with the educational and social principles behind the working document. It was produced in a rather bureaucratic manner typical of the Department. This has been admitted now by the Department and one of the originators of the whole approach, a man for whom I have the greatest respect, Seán O'Connor, the assistant secretary of the Department, spoke at the Vocational Teachers' Association seminar and he was reported in The Irish Times as saying that the document was not designed to impress or to win over people. He said it was designed as an instrument of negotiation. He said:
This working document was not intended to spell out to the last what a community school might be. It was left in such a manner as to be developed. It was even ambiguous, he said, in the sense that it is there for discussion and you can change it. You can decide which way it goes, not you (the teachers) but the people who are going to have to live with it in every centre, and they will change it to suit them not to suit you.
That was frank talk from the assistant secretary of the Department of Education and one can admire him for it. He also went on to suggest that the document was only a lead-in to the fundamental concepts of education which we had yet to consider in an Irish context. He said:
We have not yet come to the heart of the matter in education. We are too concerned with academic evaluators as predictors of life success... and the effective goals of education are mainly ignored. The effective goals, he felt, were the social and personal dimension of people and the love which people have for other people. If we do not develop this we do not develop the community at all. All we have is a sprawl of 300 or 300,000 houses but there is not any community. I know that academic evaluators are needed but they must be put in perspective. If the community school should be no more than another—even perhaps much improved—vehicle for job attainment then you can have it as far as I am concerned.
This is how he explained to the vocational teachers what he meant by a community school and what he was envisaging. I want to assure the Minister that the approach was one which merited full support and one which we in the Labour Party would not cavil at. We agree that there is a need for relatively large sized schools to provide a broad range of subjects and to allow a large element of choice particularly in sixth form subjects. We also feel that there should be a balance between the scientific, the technical and the academic courses to provide on the one hand skilled manpower for the economy and on the other for the overall development of and specialisation by the child. We also welcome strongly the approach that community school buildings should be designed on a multi-purpose basis which would allow a much more informal and creative approach to education and would cater for the social training of young people and relate education directly to the community. Above all, they would provide facilities for after school hours, education for youth groups and adult groups.
If properly developed in Irish society, the community school will be a focal point in the community and many of the local public and welfare services will be integrated with the school itself. There will be a library, a swimming pool, a health centre, a citizens advisory bureau, a gymnasium and so on. This is my concept of a community school. It is not original but there will be tremendous difficulties in ensuring that it will be brought to full fruition. Otherwise we will have primary and post-primary schools, isolated areas of social development from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m., locked after that and not really involved in the community after 4 o'clock in vast tracts of concrete canyons in suburbia with the school being merely concerned with the production of technical ability and there will be no social integration. If we take the proposals of the Minister and implement them properly, it could transform the whole structure of local participation and, indeed, of community development. It could ensure that town planning and local government planning would be properly developed and this is a great need. The tragedy is that while the Minister has been sorting out the faith and morals of everybody we have not sorted out anything in relation to the social and human engineering of education. There should be much greater discussion in this House on what exactly we want community schools to do. Do we want them to be a kind of half way house between a vocational and a secondary school?
If that is what we want I think it will not be very effective. Do we want it to be a school of 400 or 500 or 600 children all streaming out at the end of the period with their leaving certificates and perhaps going into jobs for which they will be ill-trained and in which they may suffer extreme frustration? This could be the development unless the Minister properly defines the approach to community schools.
One definition, not particularly good, was that in the Plowden Report, children and their Primary Schools, published in 1967:
We need a school which is open beyond the ordinary school hours for the use of children, for the use of their parents and, exceptionally, for other members of the community.
That is a rather utilitarian definition and simply throws up a sort of timetable to keep the school open from nine in the morning to nine at night. To me a community school is readily identified with a large neighbourhood where it becomes the focal point of almost all community activity. Therefore in an urban area it should be in the centre of or readily accessible to the community. In a rural area it would need to be very close to the rural centre of population.
We must not think of a community school in an exclusively post-primary context. This is very important. I am appalled that there was very little discussion in Tallaght or Blanchardstown about primary school facilities in both areas. Had I the opportunity as Minister for Education of thinking in the context of Tallaght, with 100,000 people there, I think I should say that the logic of the community school is to include primary and post-primary education and let them work that out between them in the Tallaght area. Surely this is the logic of a community school in which children would grow and develop their talents from an early age in the primary school and progress through that school. Why do we not have a situation in which a child need not go to a different school in order to avail of a swimming pool? A child of ten or 11 can certainly use a swimming pool in a community area as effectively as an adolescent. The same pool would serve both; the same educational structure should serve both.
My concept of a community school is that it could apply to both post-primary and primary education or possibly at a lower level. Ironically, primary schools are really meant to be community schools. One sees this if one goes back to the 1830 Primary Education Act and if one bears in mind that the parish priest was asked to be the school manager in the original approach. One might point out in regard to the 1830 Act that the local community, if we are familiar with the trustees in the primary schools sense, was asked to appoint a manager to the local school. In rural Ireland the primary school was very much a community school and it was tragic that the de jure position of primary schools as the original community schools was not properly developed and extended into a community setting. This point might be made strongly.
The distinguishing feature of the community school is that in a rural area where there is low density of population, and one must have a fairly broad catchment area, one can have a community school for 300, 400 or 500 pupils and, where people are much more integrated than in urban areas, three or four townlands together can form a local community school. It is more of a possibility in the rural areas to have that approach particularly if one amalgamates primary and post-primary structures. This should be possible and should be fully considered by the Minister.
In England the urban community school received a great deal of impetus from 1966-7 onwards after publication of the Plowden Report which pointed out—this was the one great feature of the report, a very simple feature which politicians tend to ignore—that in socially and educationally deprived urban areas community schools can have a revitalising effect. How can one possibly provide education, for example, in whole areas of Dublin where families of two, three, four or five children share the one living-room with the parents and elder brothers who are at working age? They have no hope of doing any study in their own homes.
Coming from a working-class home I know from personal experience that, it is quite impossible for a young child to sit down to work in the evening, especially with the modern intrusion of television which is on permanently in many homes from 5 p.m. to midnight, in the "ticky-tacky" local authority houses, where there is no open plan and everybody is jammed into one room while there are two empty rooms upstairs called bedrooms and that is the total space available to the family. How can a child do any effective work after school hours in regard to educational preparation for the following day? The answer is that in these socially deprived areas the environment of a community school would enable the child to stay later in school and avail of the school's facilities to finish off his lessons or do some further work. This will be of major benefit to him. If we had proper community schools parents would be encouraged to take an active interest in what was going on in the schools. This would be most welcome.
Those areas most in need of such schools are the areas in which there is a high proportion of skilled, semiskilled and unskilled workers, an area in which there are large families living in overcrowded homes. A local community school would help to get rid of basic environmental defects in such areas. When the Plowden Report was published in Britain, Mr. Crossman acted immediately on the recommendations and he designated five priority areas. One such area was in Liverpool in which many Irish people live. Densely populated neighbourhoods were selected and in these areas community schools have now become the centres of community learning and social activity. These schools have been highly successful in Britain and there is no reason at all why they should not be highly successful here. I do not think the finance needed to implement such a policy would be all that great. There are many socially deprived areas in Dublin, Limerick, Cork, Waterford and Galway. Community schools could play a vital part in community development in these areas.
We believe such schools have tremendous potential. The environment in certain housing estates is not all that it should be. There is no sense of local community conscience. If community schools were set up in such areas they would generate a dynamic community life. I assure the Minister I welcome the idea of community schools. There will, of course, be certain problems. The community school concept will pose considerable difficulty where the traditional Catholic management of schools is concerned. This has been admitted by Church leaders. Cardinal Conway published a booklet recently on Catholic schools. In that booklet he wrote:
The fact is the child's basic formation for life, whether social, moral or religious, is likely to be gravely affected if the two great formative influences, the home and the school, do not collaborate and support each other. The formation of the child is a continuous process between the home and the school and one should be, as far as basic truths and principles are concerned, a continuation of the other and, if it is not so, the preparation of the child for life may be greatly weakened, if not rendered schizophrenic.
Now the area in which disagreement arises is on the question as to how the child will be formed. Some people, adopting a narrow, religious approach, would interpret this formation as being largely the moulding of a child into an almost purely religious pattern and way of life. Others would interpret it in terms of the development of the child's personality and potential. There is a difference of approach and this has been one of the major issues. I do not know if many Members of this House pay much attention to a colleague of mine in Cork, the Rev. James Good, but I attended a meeting last year in Maynooth at which he spoke on community schools. His remarks are interesting, coming from a well-known Catholic priest. He said:
Many of you will have read the document "Community Schools", issued to the Irish bishops and subsequently leaked to the newspapers. Educationally speaking, it is dynamite. In a little over 1,000 words it topples the structure of second level education as we know it, and introduces a whole new series of concepts which are new and as yet untried in Irish education. The typical unit created by the new proposal will be the result of the amalgamation of boys from the Brothers' school, girls from the Sisters' school, and the vocational schools' pupils, all now joined together in one single school, coeducational, comprehensive in its facilities, and controlled by a Board representative of the community generally, and available for adult education classes in the evening. It is of course an arrangement which bristles with difficulties, and that is possibly the reason why so many people have already bristled at the mere mention of the term "community schools".
This is a pretty straightforward statement from the Rev. James Good, a man of deep understanding and with very radical views as to the role of the Church in society and the role of the Catholic Church in particular in education. Twelve months ago at Maynooth he said:
The main fact here is that in the matter of control of schools at the secondary level we are fighting a losing battle,—
by "we" he was referring to his fellow-religious
—in that we are trying to spread an ever-thinning number of Religious over an ever-growing number of schools with the inevitable result that the layman must ultimately stand up and say "I will not serve." The alternative is, in my mind, quite clear. As I see it, it would occur in two phases. The first of these would be a phase in which Religious would hand over control of the schools to the Community Board as envisaged in the Department's document, and continue to teach in the schools for the present as ordinary teachers. The second phase, which I would not envisage occurring for some years, would be the transfer of Religious to noneducational projects where the need for their presence has been clearly demonstrated.
This was straight talking by Dr. Good. As we know, he has been rather ostracised by certain members of the Hierarchy at local and national level for stating these obvious truths in relation to education, truths which people will have to face in the years ahead. The Minister should examine carefully all these problems.
I note that the Minister has set a building date for construction of the community school at Tallaght. On 12th February an announcement was made by Mr. Noel Lindsay of the development branch of the Department of Education that construction work would start in August. The first phase, which will cater for pupils up to intermediate level, is expected to be completed by August, 1973.
I would ask the Minister if he has given any real consideration to the kind of school that will be built. Will we have yet another typical, conventional secondary school, which may have the words "comprehensive school" or "community school" over the front door but inside it will be yet another post-primary school? Will any real imagination be displayed with regard to the construction of the new school? Has provision been made for playing fields in the grounds? I hope there will be a swimming pool attached to the school. Many of the educational buildings being erected are out-of-date already and they do not meet modern educational requirements. The present revolution in educational thinking demands that the layout of buildings, particularly for community schools, be radically changed from the conventional design. There is great need for much more flexibility in the design of schools; otherwise the schools will not be able to meet the heavy demands that will be placed on them.
I shall give one example. In south county Dublin a typically conventional post-primary school is used by the local community. However, if a residents' association meeting is held in the school the adults spend half the night taking out desks, setting out chairs for the meeting and, generally speaking, the building is cramped and unsuitable. If a community school is to serve the community's purposes in the evening, and if we wish to have less of a formal classroom approach in such schools, it is imperative that more flexibility be displayed with regard to the layout of the building. If the school is to be a central meeting place for the community the structure must be different. The addition of an assembly room or a room in which seminars might be held generally are afterthoughts because the Department do not make provision for them in the design and planning of the building. The design and external structure should be planned so that the future activities of the community can be catered for adequately in the years ahead.
There would be less need for a standard size of class, except for social or recreational activities where there might be an average of 30 persons involved in project work. I hope that there will be greater facilities available for teachers. In many of the schools I have visited, the teachers' rooms, the assembly rooms and rooms for preparing visual aids are totally inadequate and do not help the teachers to prepare properly for their work. There is nothing utopian in the proposals I have made and I hope the Minister will inform the House of the approach he intends to adopt on this matter.
The primary sector has been much neglected because the community schools have taken over in the past twelve months. In many respects the real problems are in the primary sector——
