Barbara Jones was one of several artists involved in the Recording Britain scheme who also provided work for School Prints. Besides watercolour paintings she also painted murals on P&O cruise-liners (S.S.Orcades, S.S.Oronsay, S.S.Orsova, S.S.Oriana) between 1948 and 1960, and for hotels, restaurants, exhibitions and schools. Her surviving work, though, is in the form of book and dustjacket illustrations, including the Woodentops children's fictional characters.

Set up in 1945 by Brenda Rawnsley, the School Prints scheme commissioned well-known artists to create lithographs, which would then be printed in large numbers and sold cheaply to schools for display in classrooms; the aim was to give 'school children an understanding of contemporary art'. Each lithograph had a drawn frame so that the print could be pinned to the wall. In the spirit of post-war optimism, artists responded enthusiastically. The scheme was a unique attempt at giving children access to original works of art in a period of austerity but ended in 1949 because of financial problems. Many of the prints depict a familiar world of everyday rural or urban life, some presenting a version of the pastoral idyll and others scenes of entertainment or leisure.