How our collection is organised

Many education administrators are also innovators, particularly at the level of state education department director. The ANME has compiled a photographic archive of a selection of notable colonial and state education administrators, among whom two former state directors of education are well known as being important innovators of their day.

The ANME collection contains a record of the history of curriculum in Australia. A highlight is its heritage collection of school textbooks, representing two centuries of Australian schooling, representative of the style and content of books over the period. It includes syllabus and curriculum documentation that highlights the many changes that have taken place in the development of curriculum and learning materials.

One of the significant educational innovations in early childhood and primary teaching in Australian schools was the introduction of Cuisenaire Coloured Rods as a system for the teaching of mathematical concepts, especially for kindergarten and primary grades. They were used to assist children understand concepts such as area, volume and elementary fractions.

The ANME collection contains a wide variety of manuscript material relating to schools, curriculum, classroom practice, teachers and education administration, ranging from admission registers, class rolls, award certificates, teachers’ programs, correspondence, timetables, teachers’ lesson notes, student work books and student annual academic progress reports. The historical significance of the majority of these types of items is that they are indicators of the day to day life of a school in times past.

With the formation of the Australian colonial Departments of Public Instruction in the 1880s and 1890s, and compulsory secular primary schooling for all children from the age of six, one of the formidable policy decisions of government school systems related to the design and construction of school buildings. The ANME has a pictorial data base on nineteenth century school buildings.

ANME selectively collects smaller artefacts, such as slates, school trophies plaques and shields, photographs, badges, award medallions, portable teaching aids such as wall charts, globes, slide projectors, school banners, pennants and a small number of school uniforms and pockets. It does not collect large items better placed in school museums.

Examples of documents of educational attainment, representative, in style, format and decoration of an industrial society's need for certification of competence at a specific level of education and training.

A gallery of Distinguished Australian Educators which includes portraits and biographical briefs of a selection of celebrated teachers, educational administrators and school principals from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A wide variety of manuscript material relating to schools, curriculum, classroom practice, teachers and education administration, indicators of the day to day life of a school in times past.

A collection of photographs of older Australian schools which have retained buildings representative of the different periods and styles of nineteenth century colonial architecture.

ANME acquires school histories published by primary and secondary schools in both the government sector and the non-government, church and independent sectors. These are found in great variety in all formats and sizes.

School ephemera refers to published or printed paper items which relate to events in which the school, its students and teachers are involved, usually printed for a single occasion or event.

A representative collection of Annual School Magazines and Yearbooks for the period 1905 to 2005, providing a resource for understanding the schooling and childhood experiences of past generations.

An extensive and expanding collection of curriculum and subject syllabus documents and handbooks, mostly relating to twentieth-century reforms, with some dating to the earlier introduction of public instruction acts in the 1880s.

School textbooks dating from colonial times and representative of the style and content of books used in Australian schools: an indicator of curriculum change and development across the last two centuries