Catalogue description Board of Education and predecessors: Elementary Education, General Files

Board of Education papers relating to general subjects concerned with elementary education. This series of files is associated with the consideration and formation of the department's policy under various Acts and Regulations; it also takes in aspects of procedure and organisation.

The Second World War gave rise to a considerable volume of papers on new subjects. These describe arrangements made for the education of foreign refugee children, wartime employment of schoolchildren, and evacuation and reception arrangements. Problems confronting teachers are also recorded. Administrative difficulties included the law of school attendance, rearrangement of holidays, inspection, curricula, cultural provision (music and the arts) and wider issues of education reform and postwar policy. The papers reveal measures taken to ensure the supply of essential school accommodation (including emergency provision for children of munition workers) and of scholastic equipment - with the complication of the application of the purchase tax.

The files up to 1921 are the surviving residue of a former unnumbered series. A number of these files contain indexes.

In 1921 a numbered series was introduced. Papers concerned with the administration of pre-1921 Education Acts on general subjects relating to elementary education were placed on files identified by descriptive titles. The system of registration keys subject headings to a block of consecutive numbers. This numbered series absorbed earlier papers from the 'unnumbered' series wherever comparable provisions in earlier Acts enabled a continuity of subject matter to be maintained.

The current numbered series of General files relating to elementary education expands by the creation of new files in respect of additional educational provisions arising from further Education Acts.

See also Records of the Accountant General's Department and Finance Branch:

Division within ED

Welsh Department files concerning elementary education are in ED 92

This series is continued in ED 147

Pre-1921 papers not absorbed into the numbered series suffered much destruction.

Board of Education, 1899-1944

Education Department, 1856-1899