Where will I find photographs of schools and old school class photographs?

There are a few options you can try.

School Buildings and Classroom Scenes.

Most local authority archives have collections of photographs which are likely to include photographs of school buildings and may also have some classroom scenes.

Class Photographs

Each year photographs of classes and individual pupils is carried out in most primary schools and some secondary schools. Usually a local photographer is hired by the school (or by the education authority) to take the photographs. Copy prints are offered to parents of the children. Sometimes the school keeps copy prints of group photographs of classes. The negatives and the copyright, in general, are retained by the photographer. There is no general archive of school class photographs in Scotland. Therefore, apart from the occasional class photograph which finds its way to an archive or local studies library, there are four possible sources for individual and group photographs of school pupils. The first is the family of the school pupil. The second is the school itself (but there is no guarantee that the school will have kept photographs, and even if it has, these are likely to be framed prints of group photographs). The third is a former pupil association, if one exists, which may have maintained collections of photographs. The fourth is the local photographer who did the work. In the case of recent photographs, it may be possible to track down the photographer, if the school staff remember which photographer carried out the work and the photographer is still in business. For photographic work carried out beyond the living memory of staff in the school concerned, it would be time consuming to find out the name of the photographer through the school log books (if they survive, and if the head teacher has recorded the name of the photographer – most do not). Even if the name of the local photographer was found, there is little chance that the firm will still be in existence, and even less chance that an archive will have received the firm’s negatives. If these do survive, against all odds, the collection may be listed in John Wall (ed.), Directory of British Photographic Collections (1977).