Page:The Extravagent Expenditure of the London School Board.djvu/10

 which have been adapted or enlarged, as these generally result in higher figures and are otherwise misleading.

It is difficult to obtain detailed information as to the cost of building Voluntary Schools, but it is generally known among architects and others acquainted with such matters, that the total cost, including superintendence, averaged considerably under £7 per child—indeed this was considered a high figure. From a list, however, of the Schools erected under the auspices of the National School Society, for the past four years, we find that the average has been £6 per child. To take now the London School Board Schools, we find that those designed by "outside Architects " provide accommodation for 26,358 children, at a cost of £209,245, or £7 18s. 9d. per child, and that the Schools erected from the Designs of the Board Architect have, up to the present time, provided for 98,182 children, at a cost of £1,010,320, or £10 5s. 10d. per child.

These figures speak for themselves. Not only is the cost of building the Board Schools some 46 per cent, above that of Voluntary Schools, but the School Board itself, at the earlier stages of its career has erected Schools, of the efficiency of which no question is made, at a cost compared to which its later Schools are some 29 per cent, more expensive. This simply means in plain English, that if the School Board had even only continued to erect Schools upon the same principle as that upon which they began, they would up to the present time have saved to the ratepayers an expenditure of nearly a quarter of a million of money.

It should also be borne in mind that these earlier Board Schools were built in the years 1872 and 1873, a period when the building trade was at its highest point of prosperity, and when building materials were abnormally high.

But there is yet another view of these figures. Not only