CO129-599-2 Salaries Commission- 1947 Report 1-1-1947 - 31-12-1949 — Page 63

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service, and that thereafter the tour should be reduced to three years.

Study Leave.

155.

The implementation of the policy in regard to local recruitment necessarily implies that periods of study leave should be given generously in all appropriate cases. For the time being, the number of local officers who should require study leave may be relatively small. In any case, in these days, it is not easy for a man from overseas to obtain admission to professional and technical courses of study in Great Britain, to which country, it is hoped, a man vill naturally turn for the acquisition of knowledge and experience. But this question of study leave will acquire increasing importance with the lapse of years.

156.

We therefore make the following general recommendations on this matter:-

(i) To assist promising assistant professional

officers to qualify by the acquisition of special experience or higher diplomas for promotion to the professional grade, the granting of study leave on the recommendation of a Head of Department at any time after such officers have completed five years scrvice should be favourably considered.

(ii) Local professional officers with more than

ten years service should be allowed to accumulate their annual leave up to six

months in order to enable them to take refresher courses or to study the latest developments in their professions.

(iii) Where study leave is granted under the above recommendations, return passagos and tuition fees should be paid by Government.

(iv)

Officers who are granted study leave under these recommendations should be required to enter into an undertaking to continue, in Government service for at least five years after the completion of the study leave granted to them.

Sick Leavc.

157.

The only representation on this matter that we received related rather to the form than to the operation of the sick leave rules. It was represented that a man suffering from a slow moving disease is left uncertain by the terms to which the rules are framed whether he will get ample sick leave to give him a chance of complete recovery and that this uncertainty might be a factor in retarding a cure. It was not alleged that the rules had ever been applied in a way that justified any fear; in fact the evidence we received showed that the Government was accustomed to interpret them liberally. If the rules were redrafted in the sense suggested it would involve no change in Government practice, and therefore we suggest that a revision might be considered.

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