Can the school magazine survive the social media age?

After all these years its pages smell distinctly fusty and its rusting staples are hanging on by a thread. But there is something about flicking through an old school magazine that jolts the past back into the present in a way nothing else quite can.

More than four decades on, there they still are: those apparently trivial but meaningful events that punctuated my and my schoolmates’ formative years, faithfully chronicled for all time. The doings of the sixth-form committee that ran weekly tea parties for the elderly are painstakingly recorded. A report of a field trip to Warwick sits alongside details of a junior school production of Antigone.

Long-forgotten faces from my girls’ grammar school swim into view as I turn the pages. Their names are rendered simply as an initial followed by a surname and a year (P. Clarke, 2S, A. Green, LVIR), but suddenly I can recall them all.

Details of O- and A-level results, Associated Board music exams and hockey fixtures jockey for position with the news of a pupil who has become the first woman ever to win an Open Scholarship to a particular Oxford college. The school orchestra has tackled the challenging overture to Strauss’s Die Fledermaus in a local music festival.

It all sounds like something from another world, and in many ways it is — a nostalgic combination of innocence and seriousness, as perhaps we ourselves were. Certainly, the way teenagers conduct their lives and interact with each other and the adults around them has changed beyond recognition since then.

That being the case, is there any place in today’s social media age for the traditional school magazine? Or has it been swept away — along with my old school’s velour hats, deportment badges and brown shoes with heels no higher than an inch — on a brash, digital tide of Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat?