AN URGENT NEED

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXIII, 3 December 1940, Page 4

AN URGENT NEED

ADDITIONAL ACCOMMODATION AT GIRLS’ COLLEGE PRINCIPAL'S REPORT TO GOVERNORS REPRESENTATIONS TO DEPARTMENT The urgent need for increased accommodation at Nelson Girls' College was stressed in a report by the Principal, Miss J. Stewart* to the monthly meeting of the College Council of Governors. The Council decided to forward a copy of the report to the Education Department and to support it with representations for an extension to the present buildings. “I consider it necessary to raise onci again the question of classroom accommodation and the urgent need for it* extension,” stated Miss Stewart’s report. “The following ‘temporary* arrangements have now been in existence for from three to nine years:— (1) The library in use as a classroom. (2) Two rooms in the boarding department in use as (a) Upper Sixth Form room; (b) Prefects’ room. (3) A cloak room converted into a dressmaking room—well equipped certainly but not altogether satisfactory in other ways. “So much stress is now rightly laid on craft work that a classroom properly equipped for this purpose is necessary in addition to an art room. With the exception of those senior girls, whose time is fully occupied in preparation for the University Entrance Examinations every girl in the school has at least two crafts periods a week in her time-table and the girl* in the Home Course many more. “We are a ‘combined’ school, in which the technical side of education receives the same consideration as the academic. At the beginning of thi* year we had 93 girls taking a professional course, 181 taking a general course, 115 a commercial course and 66 a full home course. In the case of 70 only of all these 455 girls were we unable to provide for crafts in their timetables because of the need for concen« trating on work for exarpinations. “My recent visit to Marlborough College showed me what the possibilities are in a modern school building, provided with spacious accommodation and with every facility for all brancho of secondary school work.”