The Macclesfield House Collection mainly consists of records of a survey of Oxfordshire Schools carried out by Percy Elford the first Chief Education Officer of Oxfordshire County Council. Elford visited all the schools under the Council's management in the early 1900s and recorded many details about the current physical state of the schools and the education they provided. To aide the survey Elford created standardised forms for the information he recorded, so there is consistency of information across all the schools. Please note that this collection contains no records of Oxford schools as they were run by Oxford City at this time. The collection was maintained and updated for a number of years after its creation and includes Grammar Schools that were transferred to the County's care in the 1920s. At the end of the collection are some administrative records regarding the closure of small schools and photographs of the construction of Macclesfield House, the long time home of the Education Department.
The records consist of administrative records regarding the state of the school and the equipment and staffing available, accounts of the school and records of charitable bequests the school benefitted from. There are also a number of plans of the schools and Elford took many photographs during his survey. These plans and photographs have been digitised and are available to view online on Picture Oxon. There are links to the items that have been digitised in each catalogue entry.
Please note that the cataloguing of this collection is an ongoing project and more records will be added as they have been listed
The records were deposited by Oxfordshire Education Department as Acc 3775 in February 1994. Catalogued by Nicola Hole, Becky Hogben and Alison Smith, March 2019.