This type of school did not originate in London, though it has taken very firm root there. Some very interesting experiments had been made in other parts of the country, notably Yorkshire, before Battersea, the Borough, and Regent Street Polytechnics in 1894 opened their domestic economy schools, with fifty-four scholars nominated by the Technical Education Board, and the addition of a few paying pupils. This example was soon followed by the other Polytechnics, and the Board now elects 386 scholars annually, who are distributed among nine schools. The course lasts five months, and during this time the scholars receive free tuition, two free meals daily, and the material required for making dresses or other garments. They attend from 9.30 to 12.30 and 2 to 4.30 every day except Saturday. During that time they get a continuous and thorough training in cookery, needlework, dress cutting and making, laundry work and housewifery, with some gymnastics and singing. In addition to these scholarships second courses of five months’ instruction, with the opportunity of specialising in one particular branch, are now awarded to eighty-four scholars each half-year. The first course is not meant to train a cook or a dressmaker, but any girl who wishes to qualify herself for such a post gets a capital chance of testing her own abilities and inclination, and there are further opportunities of training open to her, if she desires them, in the second course or at the National Training School of Cookery. Last year four girls were apprenticed in good dressmaking firms on leaving the school. Mrs. Pillow, lately employed by the Education Department to prepare a special report on the teaching of Domestic Economy, gives an account of the work of these schools. She says: ‘Housekeeping and cookery are treated as part of the everyday life of the girls, and not merely as school lessons. The girls cook the meals which they are to eat; they learn to measure and fit themselves for the dresses which they are taught to make, and they are instructed in laundry work in such a way that they can quite well apply their knowledge to the “family wash” in their own homes. The cookery syllabus contains dishes which are well within the reach of the working man earning an average wage; the using up of odds and ends, bones, crusts, and cold vegetables, scraps of meat, etc. receives attention, and the utensils and stoves provided for the girls are similar[17] to those found in the majority of artisans’ homes.