Welfare Officer be required to report progress to a Magistrate for
his personal information and to enable him to check on the
correctness of his judgment, there can be no possible objection.
When asked for, indeed, this is already done. If, on the other
hand, it is proposed that the Magistrate have continuing authority
over the child, then it would turn the Court into a social work
agency and would run counter to the whole trend in the development
of Children's Court and child welfare work from the beginning of
this century. The Magistrate would be compelled to take on
responsibilities for which he is not trained, and Child Welfare
Officers would tend to become merely junior probation officers
attached to the Court. One of the advantages of the present system
is that the Superintendent, being the final authority, can ensure
uniform standards of case work throughout New Zealand. If it were
left to each individual Magistrate to decide exactly what should be
done with children, it is certain that wide variations in
principles and procedures would occur. Experience has shown, for
example, that some Magistrates, with no first-hand knowledge of our
institutions, would send to them children for whom they are not
established to cater.

"With regard to the Committee's suggestion that there 'should be
some person or body apart from the departmental officers to whom a
child could turn for help ...', we would agree that something like
the Visiting Justice system of the Justice Department might apply
to our institutions as a guarantee to the public and as a
protection to both children and officers. However, to extend such a
system to children boarded out in private homes would be to ask for
endless trouble. People would be loath to accept State wards into
their homes if it laid them open to official visits from laymen
whose sole function was to hear complaints from the children. The
visits of Child Welfare Officers and of Inspectors of the Division
must, we feel, be accepted as the main guarantee to the public of
fair treatment."

Without expressing any decided opinion, the Committee felt that
what the Director of Education has to say is worthy of consideration
by Government.

Certain Specific Changes Proposed by the Mazengarb Committee

In clause (5) on pages 60 to 63, both inclusive, of the re