I am grateful to the hon. Member for Cornwall, North (Mr. Scott-Hopkins) for the way in which he has put his points tonight. I will try to give some of the assurances for which he has asked, although he piled up an awful lot of requests towards the end of his speech, particularly on the point about deaf children, which was a little outside his main theme. I will look carefully into that matter and if the hon. Member would like to write to me about the situation in Cornwall in more detail I will look into it.

I should like to leave that problem and proceed to the main one which the hon. Member raised, which was the policy on the closure of rural schools, and deal with it, as he did, by speaking first of the general problem and the lines on which I believe it should be dealt with and then saying something about the school which the hon. Member had in mind. As the hon. Member says, this is an important problem in rural areas. Since the war there has been a trend for the smaller schools in rural areas to close, particularly one-form schools, and to some extent two-form schools like the one at Tresmeer.

I have been given figures which show that during 1963 there were altogether 200 closures of primary schools throughout the country, of which 133 were in rural areas. This shows the scope of the problem. Virtually every county L.E.A. has in its education plan provision for the closure of some rural schools. When they do this they advance four main arguments, on which they have to convince us in the Department, before closures of this kind are approved.

By far the most important are the educational arguments. If 20 or 25 children of all ages from 5 to 11 are being educated by one teacher in a one-form school, there are in the nature of things certain educational disadvantages in that system. This has been true for some years. It will become even more true as new techniques become available in primary teaching. At the moment we are going through an exciting period of development in primary teaching. All kinds of things are happening, including the teaching of languages, and there is a great danger of a gap between the standards of primary education in towns and those in the countryside.

The second consideration is the question of buildings. A large number of village schools are very old, and very often it is not realistic to plan for the replacement of a village school by a new school when it might be more sensible and rational to have one which covers more than one village. Combined with that are considerations of finance and the fact that very often by rationalisation of the pattern of rural schools there are considerable savings in salaries, heating, upkeep and so on.

The fourth reason is the question of the supply of teachers. As the hon. Member knows, we have seen an overall shortage of teachers which is particularly severe in rural areas where it is difficult to recruit good people to new posts when teachers reach retirement. This is a factor which often leads local education authorities to consider closures.