NRS-16665 | Registers of Admission, Progress and Withdrawal [Cessnock 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; 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, date of leaving the school and any occupation entered into on leaving school is also recorded; this last column is also used to indicate the school to which a pupil may have transferred.The volumes of the present series reflect the organisation of the school, in that from 1913 onwards the separate departments into which the school was divided in that year each have their own Admission Registers. These departments are the Infants’ School, the Boys’ Primary School and the Girls’ Primary School (the latter known as the Domestic Science School before 1927). It was the intention of those who designed these registers that girls and boys were to be listed on opposite pages in order of admission. This provision is only applicable in the case of the Infants’ School registers, and is ignored in those which record enrolments at the two Primary departments, which were segregated by gender until, it would appear, 1964, when for the first time a mixed group of enrolments is entered in what had, up to that year, been the Boys’ Primary School admission register. This is the last page used in that register, and the circumstances that a large number of pages in this volume remain unused, and that the Infants’ School register also terminates with pages left blank at nearly the same time, suggest that some re-organisation of the school’s Admission Registers may have taken place in 1964.The surviving Admission Registers cover the Domestic Science School/Girls’ Primary School for the years 1919-1927 and 1939-1959, the Boys’ Primary School for 1923-1964 and the Infants’ School for 1950-1963.Admission registers in paper format ceased in 1999 when the department moved to recording enrolment details in electronic format.