4
REVIEW
As with domestic buildings, so with schools. Many school build- ings had been destroyed in the war, and in 1945 there was a total school enrolment of about 4,000 pupils and a seven-year back-log of uneducated or partly educated children. Drastic measures were needed to rebuild and reorganize education and the school system, even for the population which existed in 1945. Nobody could then have foreseen the unprecedented increase in child population and the enormous influx from China which was to follow, and which, with other causes, was to delay for more than 20 years a sufficiency of primary school places to meet the demand. The first step, taken in 1946, was to house two schools in each building on a morning and afternoon shift basis, but by 1949 it was recognized that the whole system of school provision had to be re-examined. The Fisher Report was tabled in Legislative Council at the end of 1951 and, as an immediate result, sponsors of private schools were given greater encouragement to build and expand with the provision of recurrent aid for more private schools through the subsidy code, and of government grants towards capital costs. The year 1951 also saw the beginning of a survey of sites for schools with roof-top, rather than conventional, playgrounds in order to conserve space. In the same year all primary schools were permitted to enrol up to 45 pupils per classroom. A seven-year programme of primary school expansion, based on the recommendations of the Fisher Report, was inaugurated in 1954 with the aim of providing, by 1961, a primary school place for every child of primary school age. This called for 182,000 new places, a figure raised in 1956 to 215,000. Designers set out to produce school buildings capable of mass production and adaptation which would not require an extravagant amount of land. While the accent was heavily, and in the circum- stances rightly, upon primary education, other needs did not go unattended. In 1952-3 the Colony's requirements for technical education were examined, eventually resulting in the building of a new Technical College in Kowloon. In 1954 a tentative experiment in adult education was embarked upon by the government with the organization of classes for factory workers.
During the immediate post-war years the dense overcrowding, exiguous water supplies and inadequate housing and environmental sanitation left the Medical and Health Department no option but to concentrate its resources on the control of communicable diseases.