ABSTRACT
Education boards, as the authorities immediately responsible for primary education, were presented with difficult problems of staffing and accommodation. Unable to speed up their building programmes, they were forced to turn to the Department of Education for help, reluctant though they were to lose any more of their already very limited autonomy. The minister drew attention to some rather obvious implications of the threatened understaffing. 'A greatly increased number of teachers', he predicted, 'will be necessary to enable the size of classes to be reduced and the period of teacher training to be extended by a year'. His prediction proved distressingly accurate. A survey of two post-war decades of educational development in New Zealand must inevitably dwell on frustrations, deficiencies and vexations. It was a time of patching up, of making do, a time when, of necessity, the quantitative rather than the qualitative aspects of education were emphasized.
