E.—2.

for secondary education other than technical would necessarily be kept from growing too rapidly. The junior technical scholarships provided for in the regulations of the 18th June, 1903, were intended to be held in part-time day or evening classes by students who had left school to go to work. In 1903 the Wellington Technical School was handed over as a going concern by the Education Board to a board of managers constituted under the Act and including representatives from the Education Board, the City Council, and the Industrial Association, which were contributing bodies. Thus when I took charge early in 1904 the school had been thrown entirely on its own resources, the Education Board having no longer any responsibility for any loss that might be incurred in working. The position in regard to free places was that the Wellington Colleges were not inclined to open their doors except to the most highly qualified applicants, while the prospect of an inrush of pupils to part-time day or evening classes at the technical school was not promising. Further, it was soon apparent that the conditions under which the evening classes were conducted were unsatisfactory, and proposals were made to the Department and approved for the establishment under the regulations for manual and technical instruction in full-time day technical courses for junior free pupils. The following extract from my 1904 report (pp. 22-23, E.-5, 1905) states some of the conditions which led to the establishment of the day technical school. " In regard to the classes generally, a certain amount of reorganization appeared to be necessary in order to bring the school more into line with modem developments, especially in the engineering and other technical classes, which seem to have received less attention hitherto than their importance demands. A great difficulty has been the lack of uniformity of students in the various classes of the school, and the absence of gradation of the work. Elementary and advanced students attended the same class, with the inevitable result that the teacher's time was frittered away in individual tuition in many cases where class-teaching would have been much more suitable. There has been, and still is, a painful lack of proper accommodation and equipment for many of the classes outside the art department, and even for these art classes the rooms and equipment are far from being entirely suitable. Another disadvantage under which the school labours arises partly from the floating character of the population of the town, q,nd partly from the fact that in any miscellaneous class more advanced students are with difficulty kept, so that for both reasons the class itself tends to become a procession of students, who stay for a term or two and then leave the school, with the merest smattering, to make room for fresh students. " Under the system of having four terms in the year, and of admitting students at half term as well as at the beginning of each term, this evil is exaggerated. This system, however, has been adopted in order, apparently, to maintain the number in attendance as high as possible, so as to keep the revenue of the school at a sufficiently high level to meet the expenditure. It is by no means certain that in this respect the system does not defeat its own object. At the same time, we would suggest that classes in advanced subjects, being, as a rule, small in numbers, should be able to earn capitation at a much higher rate than the large elementary classes. It appears, however, that by running large elementary classes sufficient capitation may be earned to make up the loss in fees and capitation on the more advanced classes, and it is in this direction that a solution of the financial question may be found. These elementary classes must be made a satisfactory nursery for future advanced students if the system is to become self-supporting in every sense on the basis of the present scale of fees and capitation. With our present limitations of room, and having regard to the class of evening student that we can attract, these elementary classes must be conducted during the daytime, and must therefore be confined largely to younger boys and girls undergoing preparation for apprenticeship. We are in hopes that arrangements may be made for admitting apprentices to day classes in future years, so that the science of his trade may be learned by the apprentice at the same time as the practice. It is only by a connected training beginning as soon as the student leaves the preparatory school, and extending up to the end of his apprenticeship, that we can hope to prepare the young New-Zealander to meet competition from men trained in other parts of the world. Unless we can give the student such preparation we feel that the system must fall short of its object. Under the arrangements subsisting hitherto, a long hiatus generally occurs in the education of the student, lasting from the time that he leaves school till the time—often some five or six years later— when he wakes up to the fact that his knowledge is not sufficient for his trade or profession. After this hiatus the student enters the evening classes of the technical school, and attempts to pick up the lost threads of his training, and to furbish up knowledge, which was probably of the wrong kind to begin with, and has lain rusting under the dust of years since he left school. The process is painful to the student and heartbreaking to the teacher, and has the serious drawback of discouraging further effort and of postponing —often indefinitely —any real advance of the student in the knowledge for which he comes thirsting to the school. The courses of the school have been reorganized for the year 1905, by permission of the Department, in the following ways : (1) The evening classes have been arranged so as to separate more completely elementary and advanced students ; (2) day classes for the preparation of boys and girls for apprenticeship have been established with a view to providing a nursery for the evening classes, and so meeting as far as possible the present difficulties of the evening work."

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