Catalogue description Board of Education and successors: Accountant General's Department, later Finance Branch: General Finance Files

General finance files of the Board of Education and successors, Accountant General's Department, later Finance Branch concerning general financial policy and administration of grants to local education authorities following the introduction of the Education Act 1918.

The files include material on the drafting and revision of regulations relating to building grants, maintenance allowances, teachers' salaries, necessitous areas grant, grants for school meals and milk, overseas expenditure and the financial aspects of various other disparate subjects and on the contributions and administration of teachers' contributions and pensions and of juvenile instruction centres.

Second World War papers feature special measures such as apportionment of evacuation expenditure, use of school buildings for war purposes, emergency building labour, purchase tax and victory celebrations.

Among the more important subjects covered in the later papers are Parliamentary examination of departmental estimates and accounts, review and relaxation of central government controls over local authority expenditure and rating formulae for voluntary bodies.

Other subjects covered include revisions of grant regulations governing pooling of expenditure on advanced courses of further education; teacher superannuation; grants for the arts and physical recreation; methods of financing research bodies, and miscellaneous correspondence between the department, local authorities and interested parties.

The series also includes papers of the Local Education Authorities Advisory Committee on Inter-Authority Payments (1948-1968), and papers relating to regulations under sections 6 and 7 of the Education (Miscellaneous Provisions) Acts of 1948 and 1953 respectively, to establish the machinery for local authorities to recover the cost of educating persons not belonging to their areas.