The Quali- fications required in the
Principal of the
Technical School.
lated.
220
workers will be employed. In this capacity the Principal might be of considerable assistance to the University in connexion with such students as might be working, either during their course or after it, in local engineering works. We suggest it would be advisable to co-opt the Principal of the Technical School to be a member of the Board of the Faculty of Engineering.
82. The Technical School will have to be created. A great deal will depend on its first Principal. He must be a man who has been through the works himself. He should also have taught and be an enthusiast for teaching. He will have to be an organiser and one who will secure the confidence of those who are actually working in, and supervising and directing, the various industries. Physical and mental energy will be essential, seeing that he will have to realize that the evening classes will require his attention just as much as the Junior Technical School. As to his professional qualifications one suggestion given us as an indication of what might be looked for was a successful apprenticeship which had led up to special study in a University or elsewhere, as a Whitworth scholar. Another suggestion was that he should be of the foreman type. We believe that the right man is to be found in Britain by those who know where to look for him. We believe that the best way to recruit the Principal would be to ask the Secretary of State for the Colonies to consult the Board of Educa- tion, Whitehall. The Board is in touch through its Inspectors of Technical and Con- tinuation Schools, with all the technical education work which is being done by all the Local Education Authorities in England and Wales. The Secretary of State might also be asked to consult at the same time the Secretary to the Committee of Council on Education in Scotland. Either of these two authorities would know the type of man required and would probably be able to find a suitable candidate. It has been suggest- ed to us that it is advisable that the Principal should have had some experience of the Chinese mentality. We agree that this would be desirable, but we do not know of any such person who is thus qualified and would be likely to accept the post. We should also feel a little diffident about appointing a local man who would probably start on the work oppressed by a sense of the difficulty of this task. What is required is in our opinion some one not too old but fresh and vigorous--some one with confidence in himself and a belief in his mission. The organization of technical education is rather a specially delicate matter anywhere, but in England and Scotland the difficul- ties have been overcome. Administrative experience under a local education authority in England or Scotland would be a valuable quality in the Principal. At the time of his recruitment the Principal should not be more than 35 years of age.
83. The question of the salary for the Principal of the Technical School is not an easy one. The City of Manchester was recently advertising for a principal of its The school for Building Trade Apprentices. The salary offered was £525 a year. Motor Mechanic Instructor at the Kuala Lumpur Trade School receives an incremental salary of Straits $350 to $600. This is equivalent to £490 to £840 a year. The Agricultural Instructor at the Sultan Idris College is paid Straits $400 to $800 a month or from £560 to £1,120 a year. The salary of the Principal of the Technical Schools in Ceylon who is a B.Sc. and a Member of the Institute of Electrical En- gineers is £900. The three officers last named are on the permanent pensionable establishments of their respective Governments. The maximum salary of a school- master in the Hong Kong Government Education Department is nominally £950 a year. As the whole scheme is experimental we think that the Principal should be recruited on a five years' agreement and that under the terms of his first agreement he should receive a non-incremental salary of £850 a year.
Proposals
84. Our idea is then that there should be established and maintained by Govern- Recapitu- ment, for five years in the first instance a Technical School which should have two departments a Junior Technical School and a Department for the Further and Technical Education of Workers. The function of the Junior Technical School will be to educate boys from 12 to 14 to 16 to 18 who are going to be apprenticed to some constructive trade. We suggest that the curriculum of the Junior Technical School should cover 4 years and that the number of pupils in each year should be limited to start with to 30. The total capacity of the school would therefore at first be 120. The instruction given in the school would have to be, to begin with at any rate, more general and less technical than the curriculum of a Junior Technical School in Eng- land. This is partly because the pupils who come to it will be far less educated than the English pupils and also because the Junior Technical School while it will have to