Services for schools and colleges

Bedfordshire and Luton Archives and Records Service is committed to the principle of enabling life long learning. The service seeks to help anyone regardless of age, sex, geographical location or topic of interest. Naturally we are best positioned to help with enquiries relating to some form of history in Bedfordshire and Luton, but we are also a source of information for other research disciplines such as geography, demography, religious education, commerce and economics. Thus, by our very nature we are an education service. However, we offer additional services to those undertaking full time or part time organised study. In future we would hope to expand our services but, at the moment, what we can offer may be summarised as follows.

All schools, colleges and organised groups

We are happy to arrange for group visits to the Record Office, during its opening hours, in which we explain how to use our resources to the best advantage. We can also offer specialist advice concerning projects/studies to each individual member of the group during their visit. We do not usually consider groups larger than about twenty people due to restrictions of staffing and space. We require at least two weeks prior notice of any such intended visit and the charge is negotiable

We can also arrange visits between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. on weekdays provided we have at least a month's notice, the charge also being negotiable

We can visit schools, colleges etc. either during work time or on weekday evenings. We can deliver lectures to pupils/students or we can speak to teachers/lecturers. Please let us have any requests for this service at least two weeks in advance of your preferred date. We charge £40 for each visit we make.

Service for lower school local studies

We have begun to add pages to our website to help individual schools with the local study at Key Stage 2, these are included in our Community Archives| pages.

The Archives Service holds a large quantity of school records including those deposited by schools themselves. The two most used types of record are log books and admission registers, though other records are also available. For details of these see the SD catalogues in our searchroom.