School board minutes

School boards first met around April 1873 and will describe themselves as having been elected under the Education (Scotland) Act 1872. They are in the normal form and begin with a sederunt (a list of those present). At the first meeting, or the first after an election (every three years), a chairman would be elected, a treasurer, a clerk or secretary and an officer. The treasurer would open an account with a local bank and would receive all income, mainly from the education rate, but also from school fees and occasionally from other sources. The officer would report all defaulting parents who had not sent their children to school, and in rural parishes might be responsible for carrying out an educational census, since the first work of the board would be to establish the number of children of school age in their area, and the number of places in existing schools. The deficit would require to be made up from a school building programme. The early years of a school board are likely to show intense activity, perhaps with monthly meetings, and in rural areas at least, little or no committee structure. Later on, the minutes would be more routine, concerned mainly with administration and enforcement of attendance. In the cities the boards would have an extensive committee structure, dealing with such matters as property, teachers and teaching and finance. The minutes may well be printed and indexed.

Use of School Board Minutes

School board minutes contain information useful to a variety of researchers. They are used by local historians and, occasionally, by school pupils and teachers interested in educational provision within the area of a school board. For academic historians of education, they are a key primary source for issues concerning education between 1873 and 1919. Occasionally sectarianism was an issue, for example where Roman Catholic children attended school board schools, where they might be involved in religious or other observances to which parents or a local parish priest objected. They are of some value for the history of buildings, and occasionally of architecture more generally. Two of the schools built by Glasgow School Board, for example, were designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and the board’s records detail their relations with him, which involved a certain amount of tension. Where a local authority’s ownership of a school building is in doubt, school board minutes are often used by legal researchers in tracing whether the school building was conveyed from private ownership prior to 1873 to a school board and thereafter to later education authorities. In addition, the minutes may record whether the conveyance included any conditions. School board minutes are of limited family history interest: they rarely mention individual children but may have information about teachers and pupil teachers (young people appointed within schools to monitor and help younger pupils).