FINNINGLEY NATIONAL SCHOOL RECORDS

Comprising: log books 1875-1999

Finningley National School, otherwise Finningley Parochial School, was established in Finningley, then in Nottinghamshire, in 1855, in an existing building in the centre of the village, a little under a hundred metres east of the parish church of St Oswald. This set of log books begins twenty years later, with an entry of 8 March 1875, written by the headmaster John Lamb (who left the school in May 1880) and marking the resumption of school after a half-term break. A large part of the earliest of the three log books is taken up with entries in the hands of husband and wife Mr Myles Crooks Moore and Mrs A. E. Moore, who took joint charge of the school in 1883 and left in 1915. It was during this lengthy headship, in the early years of the twentieth century and after overall responsibility for the provision of education had passed to the county council, that Finningley National School became Finningley Church of England School.

Similarly long-serving was Thomas Taylor, headmaster 1935-1967, who presided over the provision of additional accommodation at the school in 1955 [Doncaster Archives ref: MB/BUILD/FIN/2371] and then oversaw the removal of the school from its historic home in the 1960s. A site for a new school building on the north side of Wroot Road had been favoured by Nottinghamshire County Council's Education Committee in September 1962 [MB/BUILD/FIN/5183] but it was not ultimately used. Plans relating to a different site were submitted to East Retford Rural District Council by the Committee in April and October 1964 [MB/BUILD/FIN/6283 & 6510] and these were acted upon. On 30 July 1965 the school used its original premises for the last time and at the start of that year's autumn term reopened at a new building on the south side of Wroot Road. It remains there now [March 2006], although with a new address, since access to the school is now from Silver Birch Grove - a road that did not exist in 1965. The old building was converted to use as a village hall in 1968 [MB/BUILD/FIN/9774].

The parish of Finningley, along with its Church of England school, lay in Nottinghamshire until 1 April 1974, when, in accordance with the provisions of the Local Government Act 1972, it was absorbed into the newly-created metropolitan county of South Yorkshire and metropolitan borough of Doncaster. The change in civil authority did not affect Finningley's ecclesiastical position, for the parish remained in the diocese of Southwell. Until 1974, therefore, the position of Finningley's records, civil and ecclesiastical, had been clear enough: they belonged in Nottinghamshire. From 1974 Finningley church school - a neither wholly ecclesiastical nor wholly civil institution - found itself operating under the direction of a local education authority and a diocese whose archival arrangements lay some forty-five miles apart: Doncaster Archives, which had been set up along with the new local authority, was responsible for records belonging to Doncaster MBC's education department, whilst Nottinghamshire Archives was formally appointed diocesan record office for the diocese of Southwell after the Church of England opted to place parish records at designated archives repositories in 1978. Whether or not a conscious decision was ever made to keep Finningley's church school records at Nottinghamshire Archives in order to avoid separating them from the records of the parish of Finningley and of the school's sometime other parent body, the old Nottinghamshire CC Education Department, the status quo was maintained into the early years of the twenty-first century. Mr John Marsden, deputy headteacher of Finningley church school from 1984 and headteacher from February 1989 until his retirement in July 2005, saw the existing archival arrangements as anomalous and withdrew the school log books from Nottinghamshire Archives. He deposited the log books [formerly Nottinghamshire Archives ref. SL70/1/1-3] with Doncaster Archives in March 2006.

The collection consists of a single series:

SR165/1: Log Books

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