fternoon.

In addition to the purely teaching work the mistress has to take
her share in the various activities which are now centring in the
school--Care Committees, After-Care Committees, the feeding of
necessitous children, the cleansing of children, medical inspection,
and so forth. There are also such social activities as old girls'
clubs, school journeys and school parties, in which she has to
co-operate; finally, the strain is not lessened by the fact that she
has to satisfy two sets of inspectors, viz., those of the Board of
Education and those of the local authority who require her to keep
special report books, varying in character and in the amount of detail
required, according to the idiosyncrasies of the particular inspectors
who may happen to be allocated to her district.

In spite of the building regulations of the Board of Education, many
school premises are far from satisfactory with regard to lighting,
ventilation, construction, and often even cleanliness; these defects
naturally have their effect on the health of the teachers, so that
notwithstanding medical inspection during training and the rejection
of the unfit, an alarming number of cases of consumption has been
reported to the Benevolent Fund of the National Union of Teachers.
In addition to this, the strain (already referred to) under which
teachers in the Metropolitan and larger urban districts work, is
resulting in an increasing number of nervous breaksdown.

The conditions under which a teacher works in a school in a rural
district are so unsatisfactory that they deserve special mention.
There are 245 schools in Wales and 2,199 in England with an average
attendance of less than 40; such schools are staffed by a head
teacher, assisted, in all probability, only by a supplementary
teacher. Education suffers in these circumstances as a result of the
number and the manysidedness of the responsibilities which devolve
upon the head teacher; while the consciousness of her inability to
realise her ideals will re-act unfavourably upon her health. Another
factor that must be borne in mind is that these rural schools, being
small, should, to secure efficiency, be proportionately expensive for
up-keep. In order to keep the cost of maintenance as low as possible,
however, the remuneration offered to teachers in rural schools is so
small as to be a national disgrace. To this must be further added the
fact that many rural teachers are compelled to live 5,