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some financial freedom.
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As we had accepted the principle that basic expenditure (being calculated on teachers' salaries) must be controlled, financial freedom can only be obtained on the income side through the right to make additional charges to pupils. Both the Code as it stands and your latest pro- posals provide for the exact balancing of income and expenditure, and thereby deprive the Managers of all financial freedom and the inttiative which depends on it. Both the Code and your proposals likewise make it impossible for the Schools to find their half-share of the cost of Major Repairs and new buildings a point which had been quickly noted in London. Both the se points are set out in paragraph 4 and 5 in a letter to you from a Meeting of the Anglican Grant School Councils dated 31st March 1948 of which I enclose a copy for your reference.
111. You will remember that at our meeting in London, for which you most kindly gave up one of the last days of your holiday, you agreed to drop from the Code the clause fixing a limit to the additional school charges made by the School Councils.
In so agreeing you restored to our Councils the freedom for which we were figh ting. Your letter of August 3rd takes back what you then restored to us. I can only be- lieve that you do not fully appreciate the importance of Councils to our Anglican Schools.
Perhaps you will remember that in the course of your statement you said "Bishop Hall has proposed that each school should have a council". I could only understand this remark on the assumption it was based on a conversation in your office when I suggested that in dealing with private schools, Govern- ment would be well advised to control through responsible councils rather than through detailed regulations. And in my reply to your remarks in London I felt I must say that you had been so occupied with other matters that you had not perhaps realised that I was not "proposing there should be councils", but fight- ing to save existing and vigorous councils from extinction.
In fact the original letter which led to the formu- lation of the New Code was drawn up in about 1936 by Messrs. P.S. Cassidy, John Fleming and R.H. Kotewall (as he then was) of the Diocesan Boys' School Council. The paramount part played by the School Councils in Anglican Church Education is I believe, the major difference between them and the Roman Catholic and the London Mission Schools.
And our resistance to the new Code throughout has been that a Code calculated to leave no margin does in fact destroy the autonomy of the managers and puts every decision finally in the hands of the Director whose knowledge of the parents and children of each particular school can never be as sensitive as that of a School Council.
I can therefore only believe that you have not fully understood this point, although in my interview in your office on June 14th I thought you had understood this when you ac- cepted as a possible way out my counter proposals which I later put in writing on June 29th.
This point of managerial freedom was fully appreciated by the other members of our London meeting. One member told me how surprised he had been that no protest had been made by responsible Secondary School managers faced with this Code. (I cannot understand how despatches to London made no refer- ence to our off repeated protests from 1938 onwards).
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