[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.)
Sta,—One had a great deal of sympathy with Mr.. Arthur T. H. Smith, until the last sentence of his letter was reached.- " To treat Nonconformists as. outcasts does -not even give the Church Committee an imPasy conscience.'
The bitter controversies concerning Non-Provided Schools which accompanied and followed the passage of the Education Act of 1902, are still fresh in the minds of many of us: Previous attempts in recent years, to legislate for the completion of Reorganisation of Elementary Schools, failed because it proved impossible to reconcile the interests of the various bodies concerned.
It is felt that this reconciliation has been achieved in the Education Ad of 1936, for the part of the Bill in question Passed its Report stage without a Division. The President of the Board statFd during the Third Reaaing that this "was due to the Co-Operation of all the interests concerned, the chuo..hes, the teachers, the local authorities, the various political parties, who were prepared to come together in a new atmo- sphere of conciliation, and to show that they were able to give as well as to take."
In a rural area, it may be that the Local Education Authority in the final agreement with a denominational body would approve of one of the Senior Schools being of that denomina- tion. That Senior School would serve a certain area, and it- would hardly be right or in the spirit of the Act for other deno- minations to regard themselves as being treated as outcasts. Section 12 of the Act provides for certain contingencies regard-
ing religious instruction in non-provided schools, while Section 13, the former Anson by-law (and as such adopted by many authorities) is incorporated in an Education Act.
The financial responsibility for a new Senior School may cause anxiety in the minds of many denominational bodies, for the first cost is not the last. Again, after reorganisation, will the Board be satisfied that junior and infants' schools need no reconditioning ? Who will bear the cost of alterations, if they are necessary, in non-provided schools ?
It would comfort Mr. Smith to read the article on Church Day Schools in the Manchester Guardian of the 8th inst., by " Artifex " (Canon Peter Green). In addition to warning Church leaders against embarking on an immense and costly campaign of building central schools, he says, "If our leaders had thought more of the religious teaching of all the children of the nation, and less of denominational interests, they might have approached the leaders of the Free Churches and arrived at a settlement by which all children in elementary schools . . . might have had sound Christian instruction."—Yours truly, R. S. BUTTERFIELD.
Highfield, Plaxby, York.
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