Doncaster Gazette Report of Speech Day, 22 July 1947

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Doncaster Gazette Report of Speech Day,
22 July 1947.


Speaking at Thorne Grammar School speech day on Tuesday, the headmaster (Mr. J.E.Shipley Turner) said it was a thousand pities that there should have been a lowering of standards in the recruitment of teachers, for it was (he said) bound to have ill effects on the schools in the immediate future.

Already, said Mr. Turner, it had been stated by the Secretary to the Association for Education Committees that far too many men were being trained in emergency training colleges.

“There is more than an element of truth in the cynics comment that now the only qualification necessary to become a teacher is to have been successfully vaccinated,” said Mr. Turner.

“No matter what the type of school, there should be a definite and clearly marked minimum of intellectual qualification before anyone is let loose among children of any age.”

NO EXAMS
Mr. Turner commented that no examination tests are required either before entering the Emergency Course or at its conclusion.

Standards had been thrown overboard and he knew of no other profession where such conditions could prevail.

“Yet by some strange alchemy, in the flash of an eye teachers are to be turned – I almost said churned – out who, if one believed the marvellous accounts which the official propagandists put out in the Press, are to be the very ‘salt’ of the profession, and teach the benighted but properly-trained teachers how to teach” said Mr. Turner.

Last year, said Mr. Turner, he spoke of the probable evil results which might follow the abolition of the school certificate external examination. Fortunately the axe had not yet fallen, and he hoped it never would.

This desire to make things easy and to disparage hard work would not produce the effort and the drive which the government rightly demanded from the nation today.

“Are we to remove the spur which pricks the sides of our intent and all wallow in a dull and lifeless mediocrity?” asked Mr. Turner. “It will be an evil day for the nation if this ever happens”.

The prizes were distributed by Dr. B. Mouat Jones, Vice Chancellor of Leeds University, who told the scholars about the importance of learning to think for themselves.

This was getting more difficult these days, he said, because of the BBC, the movies and the cheap Press and literature. These things made people form opinions which were not their own, he said, and the biggest contribution the schools could make to the future was to teach their scholars to acquire the habit of thinking for themselves. In his report the headmaster said that 22 scholars entered for the Higher School Certificate in 1946 and 17 were successful. Judith Robinson was first. In the School Certificate examination 83.5 per cent of the candidates were successful and the corresponding figure for the whole country was 76.7 per cent. D. E. Hodgkinson passed out the highest.