Australia Yearbook - 2001

436 Year Book Australia 2001
work, or technical college education. The ‘junior’
technical school became one of the major
innovations of the Victorian education system
and it influenced the growth of similar schools in
Tasmania.
The promotion of such early specialisation in
adolescents’ education disturbed the new
generation of departmental leaders in Victoria. By
the mid-1920s they were positioned to merge all
technical schools into the high schools. They
would have succeeded, but for the election of a
State Labor Government in 1929. It heeded the
pleas of the Trades Hall Council, the Chamber of
Manufacturers and The Age, and retained the
technical schools system. Another Labor
government would eventually incorporate the
technical schools into a new secondary college
system in the mid-1980s. Tasmania abolished its
junior technical schools in the 1950s.
The Victorian technical schools system also
created a small number of girls’ technical schools,
but like elsewhere in Australia, the main
vocational stream for working class girls in
non-academic courses was in domestic arts
classes or schools. These were to prepare girls
12–15 years old for home-making, after unskilled
work as adolescents. Most girls left these schools
on reaching the school leaving age. In Victoria’s
eleven domestic arts schools in 1929, 2,467 of the
girls were 14 years and under, and only 912 were
over 14 years.
Public secondary education after the school
leaving age was found to be the most inclusive in
the multilateral or omnibus high school which
developed during the 1920s in the larger country
towns. These non-selective schools did attempt
to meet some of the specific vocational needs of
non-academic stream students, while extending
an academic education for students who stayed
even one year beyond the school leaving age.
Indeed, within the State system the country high
school became the dominant mode of secondary
schooling in the period between World Wars I
and II. In Victoria in 1928 only six (three
selective) schools out of 60 high and intermediate
high schools were in the Melbourne metropolitan
area, while in South Australia the figure was four
out of 24. In Sydney, where the public high
school had developed more than in any other
Australian city, only 48% of all State secondary
students attended its metropolitan schools.
Tasmania attempted genuine educational
innovation in the late 1930s, when it introduced
area schools that offered a pronounced bias in
practical agriculture geared to local rural
industries in the first two years of the
secondary school curriculum. This type of
schooling proved so popular with local
communities that by 1942 fifteen area
schools had been established across the
State.
The fees question
The public provision of secondary education
was constantly the subject of debate about
tuition fees. It was apparent that when fees
were increased, extended or reintroduced, as
in almost all States during the Depression,
secondary school enrolments fell markedly.
There was both a psychological impact on
families that secondary school appeared
unaffordable, and a material impact as a
result of the collapse of family incomes in the
1930s. The reintroduction of fees as a 1930s
emergency measure came at a critical time
because primary school enrolments, which
had increased significantly in the mid-1920s,
could not be matched by the anticipated
expansion of secondary school enrolments
and retention rates between 1931 and 1936.
Thus many young Australians were cruelly
denied access to an extended secondary
education or the opportunity to complete it
in this decade.
New South Wales, as the leading public
provider of secondary education, was
potentially the most vulnerable to the
economic emergency of the 1930s. Its rapid
expansion in the previous decade, which had
seen State secondary school enrolments
treble between 1917 and 1927 (but school
accommodation barely doubling), continued
during the first years of the Depression. The
Government resisted pressure to reimpose
fees, and as a result, while State secondary
school enrolments fell in 1933 and 1934, they
quickly returned to 1932 levels in 1936, and
then evened out for the remainder of the
decade as a result of the declining birthrate
after 1927. The absence of fees in public high
schools also had the effect of attracting and
retaining students from private schools,
whose overall enrolments collapsed by nearly
20% between 1930 and 1934, again as the
result of the reduction in family incomes.
Nevertheless, the Depression took its toll on
all secondary schooling opportunities,
because in 1936 New South Wales’ secondary
education systems could not account for