NRS-17671 | Registers of admission, progress and withdrawal [Wickham Public School]

The purpose of an admission register was to record basic details about children admitted to the school, and about their parents or guardians. The registers were also used to record the progress of the children through various classes and the date of their leaving the school.These volumes contain information pertaining to each pupil including: date of admission; pupil's name, date of birth and religious denomination; name of previous school and date of leaving. The following details are recorded about the child's parents or guardians: name, residence and occupation. The pupil's date of admission to each subsequent grade and date of leaving the school are also recorded. The format of the volumes makes provision to record any occupation entered into by the pupil on leaving school, but over time this column comes to be used rather to indicate the school to which a pupil may have transferred.From its inception, Wickham Public School consisted of three separate Infants', Primary Boys' and Primary Girls' departments, with the later addition of the Junior Technical School department for boys and the Home Science department for girls. During the period covered by the extant portion of this series, separate registers were maintained for the Infants' Department and for the boys' and girls' sides of the school, with admissions to primary and post-primary classes recorded in the same registers. Only from 1941 were separate registers maintained for the Girls' Primary School and for the Home Science School. Although the printed format of the registers provides that girls and boys should be listed on opposite pages in order of admission, only the Infants' School register records both boys' and girls' enrolments in the same volume.Of those six volumes which are known to survive, one records admissions to the Infants’ School between 1925 and 1936, two record admissions to the girls' Primary and Home Science departments from 1920 to 1940, and three record enrolments in the Home Science (later, Domestic Science) School from 1941 until the end of 1961.The numbering of entries in the surviving Girls' Primary volumes, the first of which commences in 1920, is inconsistent. The original numbering is continuous from year to year, and indeed from volume to volume, the first entry in the first surviving volume being no. 895. A new system, in which the numbering of entries commenced anew at the start of each year, and the last two digits of the year-number were added to the entry-number as a suffix, was first employed in 1923, but in 1924 the register reverts to the older method. The new system appears again in 1928, but at the end of 1930 the numbering once more becomes continuous from year to year, and continues so until the end of 1933, at first retaining the year-number suffix, but eventually dropping this feature also. Only from 1934 is the newer numbering system applied consistently. The sole surviving Infants' School volume uses the newer system for the most part, but reverts to the older numbering in 1931 and 1932. The Domestic Science department registers use the newer system consistently throughout.The first volume of the Domestic Science School register was commenced as a continuation of the common register for the whole of the post-Infants' School girls' side, but the first nineteen entries have been annotated “Transferred to Primary Register,” and the volume serves only the Domestic Science school thereafter. This volume continues to record enrolments until February 1948, at which point all Domestic Science enrolments then current - the earliest of which dated from 1945 - were transcribed into a new volume, in which the record was continued until 1954.The volumes of this series are substantially intact, though most show minor wear and several have some weakening of the spine. Three leaves from the beginning of the volume covering the Domestic Science School for the years 1945-1954 are now detached and loose inside the front cover; these leaves have suffered some tearing and considerable creasing.