Welcome

Please find the recording of Fiona Gray-Davies' presentation on school records, which took place live on Zoom, on 9 July 2024 at 6.30pm as part of the Family Tree Plus programme below. The recording will be available until 18 July 2024.

The password needed to view the video or to download the handout has been supplied to you by email. If you have any queries, please email [email protected]

The handout is downloadable from here.

We mentioned in the Q&A session at the end that we would find out about Blue Coat schools, and Fiona has kindly done so:

Bluecoat schools were charitable schools founded in the 16^th century in England. The closure of the monasteries by Henry VIII meant that there was no provision for children who had previously been cared for by the monks. The first one Christ’s Hospital was established by Edward VI in Newgate Street, London to care and educate poor children. The pupils wore a blue frock coat and yellow stockings, blue being the colour of charity. Between the 16^th and 18^th century 88 such schools were set up to provide a Christian education for the poor. They therefore fall into the category of Church schools referred to in my talk as being in existence before the establishment of Board Schools. The school Admission Books and Log-books for Greenwich, Somerset and Hereford are in local archives so presumably others are in their local archives too. The National Archives states where the records can be found.

Industrial schools by contrast were set up by the Industrial Schools Act 1857 which allowed magistrates to send disorderly children to a residential industrial school. They were intended to solve the problems of juvenile vagrancy in England.