Staffing the schools

Wartime conditions produced an overall shortage of teachers of increasing severity as the mobilisation of manpower became more complete. These conditions also produced a maldistribution of teachers between different parts of the country and even between different schools in the same area. The evacuation in September 1939 and the subsequent return of many evacuees to the cities meant that the problem of maldistribution arose in severe form from the earliest stages of the war. The peacetime policy of the Board had been to press for classes no larger than fifty pupils in junior schools, forty in senior schools and thirty in secondary schools.[ ¹ ] While this policy was not immediately abandoned in any formal sense, it was in fact overtaken by the more urgent day to day problems arising out of the movement of children to and from the reception areas.