Full helpers description

College of Preceptors

Institute of Education

Overview

Contextualising information about teachers who predominantly taught in private schools, between the mid 1800s and 1940s.

Detailed usage description

The College of Preceptors was founded as a professional body for teachers. It set teaching standards and instigated a series of qualifications for teachers.

The archive holds contextualising information about teachers in private schools. A journal (which is held at the IoE) was published from 1847 and calendars were published from the 1880s into the 1920s which record the College membership. The archive also holds unpublished minutes of the College's council and sub-committes. Record of teachers who attained dipolmas, along with their examination marks and papers are held. There is also some information about schools that were affliated to the College.

If you know you had a relative who worked as a teacher for in a private school, then there is a good chance you may find rich contextualising information about them in this archive.

Although there is some information about affiliated schools and their pupils this is probably not the best place to try and trace a relative who you know was a pupil at a private school, unless you have very specific information about them and you know for sure that they attended a school affliated with the College of Preceptors.

How to tell if the collection is useful

The collection is indexed electronically, but the index is not available online. You should email the with a query giving the minimum following information about the family member you are researching:

• their name,
• the school you believe they worked at, and
• the dates you believe they worked there.

Many of the records in this archive are delicate and therefore there may be problems copying some of them. If this is the case you will have to visit the IoE in person to view the records.

If you plan to email the archivist with a query we suggest that you read our tutorial on how to do this most effectively.

Access arrangements

The Institute of Education Archives are open to the public by appointment. You typically need to demonstrate that you are conducting genuine research (which you do by emailing a valid query to the ) and bring some form of identification with you if you visit the archive. The location of the archives and its precise access arrangements are listed on the Institute of Education Information Services website.

More Information

A full collection level description of the archive (IoE ref: DC/COP) is available on the AIM25 site and the institute's own website.

Example(s) of the holdings

Figure 1. A typical exam paper from the College of Presceptors' archive. (Clicking on the image shows it full size.)

User comments

There are 0 user comment(s) about this description.

Add a comment

Abstracting information