This series consists of district and municipal school inspectors' reports. Records include correspondence inward and outward primarily between inspectorate No. 2, and the Assistant Superintendent of Education (1916); and reports on teachers filed by inspectors' names (1940-1946).
Reports for 1916 were prepared for the Superintendent of Education, Alexander Robinson; reports for the period 1940-1946 were submitted to the Chief Inspector of Schools, Dr. H.B. King. Also included are reports from the Inspector of High Schools, the Inspector of Technical Education, and the Director of the Home Economics branch for the years 1941-1946. The reports for the 1940s deal with schools throughout the province and so provide a detailed record of the state of public education at that time.
Generally, the reports contain evaluations of school buildings, equipment and grounds, along with assessments of the organization and management of individual classes within the schools. The reports also included evaluations of the teachers working in the various schools.
The reports were originally filed under the names of the school inspectors, an arrangement which has been maintained here. However, to facilitate research on particular schools and communities, an effort has been made to identify the boundaries of the different school inspectorates.
Prior to 1946 and the advent of well-defined school districts, boundaries of the various inspectorates were sometimes imprecise; the inspectorates varied in size and did not always coincide with municipal, rural, or even regional areas. The inspector of schools in Agassiz, for example, also reported on schools at Alert Bay; similarly, the inspector responsible for Port Moody also looked after schools in Saanich and Powell River. Researchers are, accordingly, advised to use this collection with GR-01492 (Directories of School Inspectorates, 1937 - 1946).
British Columbia. Dept. of Education