Author: Natasha Cantwell
Communications & Public Programming Officer
Our state can proudly claim to be one of the first places in the world to make education free, secular, and compulsory. Victoria’s Education Act of 1872 required all children between the ages of 6 and 15 to attend school, unless they had a reasonable excuse. 150 years later, the Department of Education celebrated this milestone with the 150 Years of Public Education website. Yet the histories and photographs collected for the 2022 anniversary are just the tip of the iceberg. Behind the scenes, a large-scale project is underway to collect school records from across the whole of Victoria, to preserve these pieces of history and make them easily accessible for future generations. I spoke to Public Record Office Victoria’s (PROV) Project Transfer Team about this work in progress.
The School Records Transfer Project
A collaboration between PROV and the Department of Education, the School Records Transfer Project marks the first major transfer of school records PROV has received since the 2000s.
The project started with the department’s School Records Management Program seeking to preserve historic records from our state’s oldest government schools. The program has now expanded and the department will be visiting all government schools in Victoria. Using PROV’s PROS 22/06 Retention and Disposal Authority for School Records, they are able to determine those records of long-term temporary value, and those of enduring value which are required to be preserved permanently as State archives.
The result is that this vast collection spans the whole of Victoria, from the 1850s through to very recently. There are primary and secondary schools, special schools, technical schools and even some camp schools, like the Alpine School. The Project Transfer Team are excited that, “there’s a much broader array of school types than we ever imagined!”
What do the records contain?
Once the project is complete in late 2026, the records will be discoverable to the public through PROV’s catalogue, with open access records available to be viewed in the Victorian Archives Centre’s North Melbourne reading room.
For anyone researching education history, there’s a wealth of information in the inspector reports. The inspectors were employed by the Department of Education from 1850 through to 1982, to visit schools, talk to the teachers and children, assess what was being taught and the general condition of the school. The collection also boasts an extensive range of school related photographs, as well as building files that note major renovations and extensions to school buildings over time.
The records in this transfer also provide important information about the changing cultural landscape in Victoria, from details about charity drives in a Mother’s Club minutes, through to school policies on cyberbullying.
The team describe how delving back into our earliest rural records offers a fascinating glimpse into a time when teachers and parents struggled to get basic resources for their tiny schools. “There are so many petitions! There was one where they wanted to keep a school open and they had to give a list of all the school age children in the area. And it was just one family of five kids!” In another, a teacher was arguing the case that a stable was needed for their pony.
“This poor teacher at Mallacoota school, who was working part time between two really rural schools. They would take a pony part the way, then need to kayak 15 miles the rest of the trip!”
The records transfer process
To give you an idea of the scale of this project, the Project Transfer Team have recently finished the first year of the scheduled three years and have already reached over 1,100 record series from 259 schools. Every series is a group of related records from a particular school.
With each series registered into PROV’s archival management system, the team describes the function and purpose of the records and how the records were originally arranged by the school. The records contained within the series are also described and processed into archival-quality plastic sleeves, and labelled with PROV labels before they are transferred from the Department of Education to PROV for preservation in our climate-controlled repository at the Victorian Archives Centre. This descriptive data about the records in PROV’s archival management system is subsequently published to our online catalogue.
The team also research the administrative history of the schools, capturing details such as dates the school opened or closed, the type of school and where they were located. “We’re often doing deep dives into the history of different types of schooling, investigating when different things came into existence or were legislated.” The biggest challenges often come from the small rural schools.
“There was one that only ever had 13 students attending, and it closed decades ago. It didn’t leave behind any footprint. It was like the school didn’t exist. Most of the time, for those kinds of schools, all you get is a name and a couple of dates and nothing really solid in between.”
High school records are also challenging for the archivists to appraise (the process of evaluating business activities to determine which records need to be captured and how long the records need to be kept) because when the high schools started popping up in the early twentieth century their records did not appear in standard formats. While primary schools documented student enrolments in dedicated Pupils' Register volumes supplied by the department, the format for records documenting student enrolment and results at high schools and technical schools, varied widely. The team explains that “doing a deep dive into each school to try and figure out their recordkeeping has become part of the appraisal process.”
This is PROV’s third large-scale transfer of physical records in the past few years, following on from projects with Geological Survey of Victoria and Ports Victoria, and the team have built up a successful model for doing such substantial transfers. Emma Fowler, Manager, Appraisal & Documentation emphasises that,
“to meet the scale of this project, we have needed to be systematic, flexible in our approach and well-resourced. It’s very much a collaboration with the department and working together to come up with the best way forward.”
The team points out that with major projects like this, you cannot rush into it. In fact, very early into the project, they brought in some unprocessed records to familiarise themselves with the types of records they would be working with and come up with ideas for the best way to serialise and describe them. “That early planning stage was really important to set up a process that flowed and be able to advise the department that we knew exactly what we were dealing with. So we needed to see the records in person, not just as a line in an Excel spreadsheet!”
And while there’s still around 18 months left on the School Records Transfer Project, the team would like to encourage agencies to think about their future transfer needs. For more information about transferring records to PROV, please see the guidance available here: https://prov.vic.gov.au/recordkeeping-government/transferring-records.
Material in the Public Record Office Victoria archival collection contains words and descriptions that reflect attitudes and government policies at different times which may be insensitive and upsetting
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples should be aware the collection and website may contain images, voices and names of deceased persons.
PROV provides advice to researchers wishing to access, publish or re-use records about Aboriginal Peoples