About Teachers' Registrations
The Teachers' Registrations give details of nearly 100,000 people who taught in England and Wales between 1870 and 1948; more than half of those are women.
The Education Act of 1899 made provision for the establishment of a register of teachers and the Teachers' Registration Council was accordingly set up in 1902. The register was not well received by teachers and the Council was withdrawn in 1907 and not reconstituted until 1912. Independent of the Board of Education, the Teachers' Registration Council issued lists of teachers. However registration was voluntary, neither the Board of Education nor the local education authorities used it for selecting candidates for promotion, and so registration was not universal. Registration was abandoned in 1948 and the Council the following year.
The registers chronicle the careers of the teachers who registered with the
Council and include the name of the institution where they trained and
details of the schools where they taught. Although the registrations only
started in 1914, since people already teaching registered, the records cover
teachers who started their careers from the 1870s on.
The Department for Education and the Public Record Office (now The National
Archives) approved permanent deposit of the registers with the Society of
Genealogists in 1997. The Origins Network has now scanned and indexed these
records to make them publically available for the first time, on British
Origins.
The original registers comprise one main alphabetical series and a second,
smaller, series of registrations of deceased registered teachers (often
stamped with the date of "notification of death"). Please note that the
first volume of the main series, covering names Aaron to Aleflower, is
missing, and also the first volume of the second series, A to Boait. It is
fairly certain that these do not now survive.
What do the records include?
The records (see example 1) provide the following information:
teacher's name (and for married women teachers often their maiden name as well)
Date of Registration
Register Number
(Professional) Address
Attainments
Training in Teaching
Experience
When registration started, many people, of course, had been teaching for some time. So the Date of Registration, particularly for teachers who registered in the early years (ie from 1914) was often much later than the date when they started teaching. The records include teachers who had begun their careers from the 1870s on.
The Address is generally that of the latest institution where the person was teaching, but quite often is the home address, when the word "Professional" will be deleted (as in example 1). In the latter case it is likely that the teacher was retired, and this is usually confirmed from the Experience section, where the last position shown will have a termination date, as here: "1899-1932".
The Attainments section may contain information on certificates, degrees, etc, which need not be directly related to teaching. The Training in Teaching section will identify the institution where the person received formal teacher training.
The Experience section is particularly valuable for it includes the establishments and places where they taught. Some teachers taught all over the country, and you can trace their movements over long periods. Example 1 shows that after training in Durham, Mary Banks started teaching in Yorkshire (Thirsk), moved to Cumberland (Penrith) then Westmorland (Scalebeck and Kirkby Stephen), then to Northumberland before settling down in South Shields, County Durham, where she taught for over 30 years and retired.
Example 2 shows that Frances Slater, née Price, registered in 1920, when she was living in South Shields, County Durham. In her teaching career from 1889, she first taught in Birmingham, then moved to Kent (Tunbridge Wells), then London (Hoxton), back to Kent (Canterbury), then Surrey (Farnham), back to London (Shoreditch and Dalston), before moving to South Shields in 1915 where she continued her career until 1921. (Perhaps she knew Mary Banks, particularly as they both taught in Church of England schools in the same time period.)
Though most registrants were from England and Wales, there were many from Scotland and India and elsewhere; for example Glenville Hamilton Owen, whose teaching career up till 1947 was wholly in Jamaica.
An important aspect to these records is the proportion of women included: well over 50%. The earliest registrations were during World War I, so it is not surprising that the proportion of women teachers then was particularly high.
Many records for men who were teaching before and after World War I contains
a note referring to their absence on war service.
Coverage of the records
In principle, the records of all teachers practicing in England and Wales between 1914 and 1947 who actually registered should be present. However, of 162 original volumes, two are missing.
The Original Records
Although registration only started in 1914, since people who were already teaching registered, the records cover teachers who started their careers from the 1870s on.
The original registration records are loose sheets, one per teacher, held as two alphabetic series in loose-leaf binders. The first series of 149 volumes covers teachers who were still registered in 1947, while the second series, of 11 volumes, contains the records of teachers who were deceased.
Missing records
Unfortunately the first volume of each series has been lost or destroyed, so that about 1½% of the total number of records is missing. The first extant volume of the first series starts with the surname Alefounder, and the volume covering names Aaron to Aleflower is missing. The first extant volume of the "deceased" series contains surnames from Boait, so we can assume that in this series all the records for surnames preceding this one alphabetically are missing. In total, essentially all names starting A... to ALD... will be missing plus about 7% of names starting with ALE... to BL...
The digitised images do not distinguish between the two series, though you can identify records from the "deceased" series for they will contain a note that the person has died.
"Died" notes on the records
The records for deceased teachers normally contain a small handwritten box saying "DIED", with in most cases some further information. The example here is fairly typical, containing the comment "Vide Press Feb 1945" – ie there was press notice in 1945 concerning the death of that person. Other comments include, for example, "Vide returned voting card" (ie relating to the Teachers Registration Council), "Press cutting", "Vide letter from H.M.". Sometines a date might be given, eg "Sept 1919". But often there is no information other than that the person has died, and it can be impossible to get a fix on when the death occurred.
