NRS-17253 | Registers of Admission, Progress and Withdrawal [Topi Topi Public School]

Full description

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.

The series from Topi Topi Public School is currently represented by its last two volumes, which record admissions to the school from 1920 until its closure in 1962. 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.

The earlier surviving volume was apparently commenced in 1920, and its earliest entries record those enrolments current in that year. Of twenty-nine admissions recorded before the end of that year, eighteen have the words “no record” entered under “Date of Admission.” This seems to indicate that the school’s earlier records may have been lost or destroyed by this time, a conclusion which finds further support from the circumstance that no other series surviving from this school includes material from earlier than 1920.

Girls and boys are listed on opposite pages in order of admission, and, until 1949, are numbered in two distinct sequences, commencing at the beginning of the volume. From 1950 onwards, the numbering of the girls’ entries is assimilated to that of the boys’ sequence, and this numbering is continued until 1961. The earlier volume concludes at this point, and the entries for those pupils whose enrolments were still current in 1961 are transferred to the final volume, in which they retained their original entry-numbers. In 1962, however, a new system of numbering was adopted, 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. This numbering has been applied retrospectively to all the entries in the final volume. Only one new admission is recorded in this volume after 1961.