CHILD SETTLERS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23883, 10 August 1939, Page 13

CHILD SETTLERS

The annual meeting of Fairbridge Farm Schools was a welcome reminder that the movement launched just 30 years ago by Kingsley Fairbridge is still growing and prospering, notes The Times. Last year 220 children, taken from surroundings in. Britain which offered them little prospect of development, were sent to farm schools in Australia or Canada, where, in healthy and happy surroundings, they are brought up to be useful and independent citizens of the dominion and of the Empire. The menace which has been hanging over Europe has acted as a stimulus to the good work. As the annual report says, if has given even greater purpose to the work of planning more abundant life for children "born on the unlucky side of the street." The success achieved by the movement has been the result of careful selection and of the individual attention given to each child both in the preparations before leaving Britain and in the farm schools in the dominions,. Even after his education and training is completed and the child is launched in life, there is an after-care organisation which provides him with friends to whom he can turn for help and advice. The thoroughness of the work rules out anything like mass-produc-tion methods. It must expand.