Because the experiment has been carried out. What is more, the hon. Member will be pleased to hear—or perhaps he may deplore—that these tenants have carried out many improvements in the property while it has been in their possession. They are leaving at an early date and receiving no compensation whatever for the great improvements which they have carried out. These improvements will inure to the landlord, but as in this case the landlord is a public body no doubt the hon. Member will be glad to hear that. As I say, this experiment, carried out not at our expense, has resulted in an enhancement of the value of the property. It was an experiment vitally necessary for the examination of the possibilities of evacuation, and I make no apology to the House for it. I am sure it is an experiment which the House would have desired.

The main use of the camps in war-time, we have now decided, is for the children, and we think the best thing is to make a large proportion of them available for schools which had been evacuated and were finding it difficult to carry on in temporary accommodation in the country. Our experience of other camps and our discussions with medical and school authorities led to the conclusion that camps were not suitable for very young children, who are less able to adapt themselves to camp life, and are more prone to epidemic diseases. We have therefore turned our attention to schools for pupils of it years and upwards, either secondary, or senior, or selective central schools. As the House will see, in the choice of tenants for these buildings it was very necessary that the school should be fitted to the camp as the key is fitted to the lock—a camp should not be used merely as a receptacle into which to shovel 300 or 400 children. As soon as a camp was near enough to completion it was inspected by the education authorities. At the beginning of November we proceeded, through the inspectors of the Board of Education in the reception areas, to get into touch with the schools which seemed likely to be suitable, and with their local education authorities. Hon. Members may say "This ought to have been foreseen and all this ought to have been done during the previous months." But a prospective tenant of a building learns a lot more when he sees the building erected than he can gather from merely seeing prints or plans. The school authorities went to see the premises to which it was suggested that the school should be transferred. They were not willing to buy a pig in a poke and nobody suggests they should be asked to do so. Some improvements had to be made in the schools as a result of this practical inspection by the practical people.

Again, I make no apology for having given the school authorities an opportunity of looking over the premises which were to be occupied, perhaps not for months but for years, by children for whose lives and health they—not I or any Member of this House—were responsible. These were trustees and guardians, and they looked over the premises into which they were to put the young people entrusted to their care. I do not blame them for having carefully examined the premises. We aimed at finding schools of a minimum number of 250 boys or girls which, in the first place, were not satisfactorily housed in the reception areas and which were most likely to make a success of novel conditions—and that is almost more important than any other criterion. There were not many schools satisfying all these conditions, and very few had as many as 250 pupils left in the reception areas. We did not, and we do not, think that assembling them in bits and pieces will be satisfactory. The esprit de corps is, in the working-class school, felt just as keenly as in some of the older foundations.

I have been very struck by the discussion which we had only last Monday with the various authorities concerned with evacuation. An hon. Member representing an education authority spoke very strongly of the desirability of recognising that the tradition of a school was a thing which was not confined to an upper-class school alone. When it is said that there should be some authority to compel the filling up of these camps to the exact number, I say that that is not the spirit in which we should approach this problem, nor the spirit in which the House would desire us to approach it. We found some half dozen schools satisfying the conditions I have mentioned, and the local education authority and the head teacher went over the camps with representatives of the Board of Education and of the Camps Corporation. Remember that these camps were built for other purposes than for schools. They were built primarily as holiday camps.

The undesirability of undertaking a considerable number of these experiments in the creation of boarding schools just before Christmas needs only to be mentioned to the House. In December we were all working to prevent Christmas destroying the evacuation scheme. In practice we had found that every time you stir the children around you lose a considerable percentage, and to set out in the middle of December to uproot the children from the billets to which they and their parents had become accustomed and to move them, before the Christmas parties which we had arranged with the object of keeping them in the safer areas —move them probably many miles away, would have been to lose 50, 60, or 70 per cent. of the children.

If we had moved them in the bitter cold weather, knowing that winter conditions still lay ahead of us, we should have started the experiment under the most unfavourable conditions possible. Everyone would have criticised me in the House, together with the President of the Board of Education, the Parliamentary Secretary and everybody connected with the Government for their gross ignorance in not knowing that children were sensitive plants, and would freeze if left out in the cold weather.

I do not apologise at all because I am not going to rush and uproot children from warm houses and transfer them even into central-heated huts until I see the weather improve a little. I have a report on one of the dormitories in a camp which shows that on one day this month they could not get the temperature above 48 degrees. In these circumstances I am sure everybody will realise that to have a camp unoccupied at the present moment is not a serious blunder, but a very wise precaution. If we moved a number of children under severe weather conditions we might get illness—colds and pneumonia—and everyone would condemn us for gross carelessness in the human lives entrusted to our charge.

We had the camps inspected and later we sent out the circular to which my hon. Friend referred. In the circular we did, as he says, go as low as 150 because, again, school unity is most important. We are not wasting space by having the camps occupied by 150 instead of 300 because evacuation space is space which is valuable to us. If intensive bombing starts we shall have only half the space occupied, but there will still be room for more children if they have to be moved in a great hurry. In that case, of course, all our scruples about preserving the individuality of the schools would have to go by the board. The vacant space would be doubly valuable. If we can use that space profitably and preserve the individuality of the schools, and get the good will of the teachers and parents, I am sure the hon. Member himself would be the first to say we were doing right. The response to the circular has been considerable. We have requests for over a dozen camps, and others are coming in daily. I have no doubt that the schools will be forthcoming for the camps which are now ready and those to be completed in the near future. Since last Monday even—