Series GR-1314 - Course calendars and other material

Elementary courses by correspondence were first offered by the Education Department in 1919 when John Kyle, organizer of the Technical Education Branch, provided notes and textbooks to eighty-six children living in isolated parts of the province. Thirteen of the children were living in lighthouses and Kyle afterwards noted that "this unique educational step has been the means of bringing a note of pleasure and profit into their otherwise lonely lives" [48th Annual Report of the Public Schools, p.81]. British Columbia was the first province in Canada to offer such courses.

The popularity of the courses prompted the Education Department to establish an "Elementary Correspondence School." During its first decade, the school was the responsibility of the Technical Education Branch. After 1929, following an amendment to the Public Schools Act, it became a separate branch of the department. By that time, the Elementary Correspondence School Branch was providing courses to over six hundred pupils throughout the province.

James Hargreaves was director of the branch from 1919 to 1933. (Hargreaves had previously been instructor of the Coal Mining Correspondence courses established by the department, in conjunction with the Department of Mines in 1917.) He was succeeded by Miss Isabel Bescoby (1934-1937), Miss Anna B. Miller (1937-1950) [Mrs. Anna B. Walsh, 1951], and Major A.H. Plows (1952-1968). In 1969, the Elementary School Correspondence Branch and the High School Correspondence Branch (est'd. 1929) were amalgamated as the Correspondence Education Branch, with J.R. Hind as director.