School admission registers
School admission registers are an important source of information on individual pupils in Scottish schools from the late 19th century onwards.
From 1873 head teachers kept admission registers. These contained information about the child’s school career, in a type of register which was fairly standard throughout Scotland, but whose information value depends upon the thoroughness of individual head teachers. Usually, the columns in an admission register allowed entries to be written about the following for each pupil:
name, date of birth, date of admission to the school, date of leaving school, reason for leaving (and name of other school, if transferred to or from another school), name of last school attended, name and address of parent or guardian. Sadly, in times of deprivation and childhood diseases such as whooping cough and scarlet fever, they might record the death of a child.
Additional information may be included such as exam results, class marks, annual attendance figures, and (for the second half of the 20th century) IQs
It was left to the head teacher to fill in whichever columns he or she thought fit, and, typically, admission registers contain good details of the child joining the school , but incomplete information in the other columns. Often it is not clear whether a pupil completed a full education: the head teacher was supposed to record the date of leaving and the reason for leaving, including the child attaining the statutory school leaving age, but in a large number of cases this was not done. This is often frustrating for former pupils who are required by emigration authorities, employers or higher education bodies to provide evidence that they received a standard education.
Electronic registers
From the late 1990s, most schools started to keep details of pupils in an electronic system in preference to paper-based registers. Admission and leaving information was often integrated with pupil progress records which contained academic and personal information. Pupil progress records should be retained only for five years after the pupil left school and it is therefore likely that these integrated records have in many cases been deleted. However, in some areas admission and leaving information has been extracted and retained in electronic format and local authority archivists have requested the retention of identified fields in SEEMIS, the current system used by most schools.
Confidentiality
School admission registers are subject to the Data Protection Act 2018 and GDPR. Access is normally restricted for 100 years. Individuals are entitled to access their own information but cannot access information relating to other people until the restriction period ends.
Custody of records
Many school records have not survived. Most that survive have now been placed in the local archives service but some may still be held within the schools themselves.
Contributors: Alison Lindsay (National Register of Archives for Scotland, 2002); Robin Urquhart (SCAN 2002); Editor: Elspeth Reid (2021)
I require evidence that I attended school for higher education/emigration/employment purposes. Where can I find this?
This depends on when you left school and whether you need confirmation of attendance or confirmation of exam results.
Exam certificates, 1948-present
If you require confirmation of any formal examinations, such as ‘O’ Grades, Standard Grades, National 4, National 5, Highers, Certificates of Sixth Year Studies or Advanced Highers, you should apply to the Scottish Qualifications Authority <https://www.sqa.org.uk/sqa/70972.html> [accessed 26 April 2024]
1908-48
If you sat the Higher Leaving exam in Scotland between 1908 and 1948, the records are held by the National Records of Scotland (NRS) under the reference ED36 and ED40. They survive in the form of bound volumes of returns by each school listing the names of the candidates, subjects, grades and marks. The volumes are arranged alphabetically by the parish or burgh in which each school was found. There is a closure period of 75 years. Therefore, if you sat your exams after the mid-1920s you should make your enquiry by letter or by e-mail to NRS, who will treat it as a subject access request under the Data Protection Act.
School Attendance
If you require confirmation that you attended secondary education and left school because you reached the statutory school leaving age, the position is more complicated. If you left school less than 5 years ago, the school or the Council education service will still have an electronic record of your school career.
If you left school more than 5 years ago but after about 1995 it is likely that your school records would have been held in an electronic system. These may have been destroyed 5 years after you left school.
If you left school before about 1995, it is likely that your individual school record (known as a pupil progress record) will have been confidentially destroyed. However, most schools kept admission registers, which record the name of each pupil, date of birth, last school attended, date joined school, date left and reason for leaving. If the head teacher recorded details of each pupil properly in the admission register and the register still exists, then it should provide you with the information you need.
There are three places to contact:
(a) Council Contact Centres. Councils all have contact centres which can refer your request to the relevant person to advise on whether they still hold any electronic or paper admission records of your time at school. This may be the Council’s records manager whose contact details will be found in the Council’s Records Management Plan, or it may be a relevant person in the Council’s education or children’s services.
(b) Archives. Some older paper admission registers have been deposited in the local archives service. If the archives service does not have this register they may be able to tell you who to contact.
(c) Schools. Some schools still hold older paper admission registers. If the school itself survives you may want to contact it directly. If the school still has the admission register for the years you attended school, staff there may be able to send you a letter confirming your attendance, or else will pass your details to the relevant office in the council’s education service, which will send you official confirmation. If the school does not have the register concerned, the head teacher may be able to tell you whether this has been destroyed or whether it has been passed to a local archives service.
If the school admission register does not survive, the council’s education service may be able to give you written confirmation that your school attendance cannot be confirmed because the records have been destroyed.
Are school admission registers a good source for family history or biography?
School admission registers typically contain information about individual pupils (such as date of birth, and the name and address of parent/guardian). However, this is information which can usually be more easily ascertained elsewhere, for example from civil registers of births, marriages and deaths. Access is restricted for 100 years. In most cases, therefore, information from school admission registers will not help you trace your family tree back further but will help ‘flesh out’ a family history by adding details of the life of an individual ancestor. They may confirm the date of migration of the family, whether moving to another area within Scotland or to or from another country.
How do I find out where the school records of a pupil are, if I don’t know the name of the school he or she attended?
For pupils who left school before about 1995 you will need to work out which school they are most likely to have gone to. There are a number of options, depending on the period you are searching.
For the period prior to 1873, the most comprehensive list of schools in Scotland is contained in the questionnaires returned by schoolteachers in each parish and burgh of Scotland to the Parliamentary Education Select Committee of 1838. These form part of official parliamentary papers, series of which are held by the National Library of Scotland, the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, and some university libraries.
For the period after 1873, there are several options. Postal Directories for each county and town have, in many cases, an appendix with a list of educational establishments. In the case of cities, such as Glasgow and Edinburgh, these are subdivided by district. Francis H Groome’s Ordnance Gazetteer for Scotland (various editions) mentions how many schools were in each place (in most cases) but does not name the schools.
If the education authority (e.g. school board, county council, etc) published a diary or annual handbook, these might be held by the local authority archive service or local studies library for the area concerned, and these usually list the schools and other educational establishments in the area. The local archives or library may have other resources or might have compiled lists of schools to help with these kinds of enquiries.
If the minutes of the school board for the area concerned survive for the period beginning 1873, it is worth looking at the minutes, as these usually contain information about the various schools in the parish run by the various churches, charitable organizations and so on, usually because the school board would, be discussing which ones to take over themselves.
Once you know which schools were operating in the area concerned, you can use maps to work out which school was nearest to where the pupil lived. If the pupil was Roman Catholic, look for the nearest Roman Catholic School.