* january 12, 1929

More than 300,000 children annually leave school to enter employment, and while the secondary school child has medical supervision, none of these 300,000 has this advantage. The fact is an outrage on common sense. These children are the potential capital of the nation, and yet the moment they leave school at 14 there is a tendency to go backwards in health.

50 years ago

* january 15, 1954

There is much sound sense in the Daily Mirror’s policy for education. It is good to see a powerful organ of popular opinion raising the hue and cry about larger classes. Attack from this quarter might one day draw the Labour Party off from the fantastically expensive irrelevance of comprehensive schools and concentrate its attention once more on the unsatisfied needs for classrooms and teachers. The Daily Mirror has some robust comments to make on intelligence testing, which it would abolish in selection, and on standards in the three Rs. The pamphlet’s insistence on value for money spent is far better than the present weak tolerance of declining conditions in the schools. The Labour Party is probably conscious of its past electoral debt to the Daily Mirror. The paper’s educational policy is far more in touch with present realities than the party’s.

25 years ago

An industrial dispute kept The TES out of production from November 30, 1978 to November 16, 1979.