(a)--The Organisation of the Voluntary Agencies.
We have already sketched the early history of the movement in London, and described the attempts made by the London School Board to organise the host of voluntary agencies.[372] The proposal put forward by a Committee of the School Board in 1899 to make that body responsible for providing food for all its underfed children was, as we have shown, defeated by a large majority, and a renewed attempt was made by the establishment of a central organisation, the Joint Committee on Underfed Children, to organise the voluntary agencies.
This attempt met with but little more success than the earlier endeavours. The functions of the Joint Committee were limited to receiving reports from the Relief Committees, pointing out defects in their methods of working, and acting generally as a medium of communication between these committees and the collecting agencies. If the Relief Committees failed to send reports, the Joint Committee had no power to compel them to do so, nor could the Committee insist on the remedying of the defects which they pointed out. By 1907 the Committee were able to report that only one school had been discovered in which meals were provided but no report received. "We may hope, therefore," they continue, "that ... the instructions of the Council ... have at last reached all head teachers and are being obeyed. But in default of any executive and inspecting machinery, it has taken the persistent efforts of the Joint Committee, during six years, to effect this result, if indeed it has really been effected."[373] The greatest difficulty was experienced in getting Relief Committees established in every school or group of schools in which underfed children were provided with meals.[374] Even when these committees were appointed, the meetings of many of them were held infrequently and for formal business only, the selection of the children and the enquiry into the parents' circumstances being left entirely to the teachers.[375] Consequently the methods of selection differed widely, even in the same school, the different departments paying no attention to what the others were doing.[376] The enquiry was generally totally inadequate, and in some cases was not even attempted.[377] The Joint Committee urged that, when meals were given at all, they should be given regularly at least four if not five days a week, and should be continued throughout the year if necessary.[378] But in 1907 we find that "there are still a good many schools where meals are only provided on one or two days, and more where they are only given on three days, the average number throughout the schools being 2-3/4 meals per child per week."[379] In only sixteen schools were the meals continued for more than twenty weeks during the year.[380]