The yearbook takes off in the UK

'Person most likely to ... get pregnant." "Will always remember Myers's lessons, if you can call them that." Welcome to the UK yearbook. A longtime institution of American high schools, the school yearbook has found favour here, with yearbook producers popping up all over the country. But not for Brits those weighty volumes with pages of formal headshots and the odd dreary feature written by the yearbook committee. Britain's yearbooks are hip – packed with entertaining photos and juicy text that gives a fascinating and often side-splitting insight into today's schools.

"The key difference is that UK yearbooks are student-led," says Jake Gordon, who set up AllYearbooks after finding his Nottingham University yearbook was "a bit pants". "It was expensive, black and white, and lots of people didn't have their photos in it. As a web-developer, I created an online system whereby every student could upload their own colour picture and text, and answer the same questions along the lines of 'What will you miss most?' 'Where do you see yourself in 10 years?' and 'Most embarrassing moment'. It worked so well I set up AllYearbooks and the orders have flooded in."

Because a yearbook, which costs an average of £15, focuses on one school year (inevitably year 6, 11 or 13) there's room for each student to have a page, or at least a half-page, as well as entire pages devoted to a school trip, sports endeavour or prom. The result is an often witty and always telling account of British school life.

Sometimes teachers mind the uncompromising honesty, says Gordon. "Although we get growing numbers of primary schools ordering yearbooks, the majority are GCSE years or sixth forms, so there's less editing than you might think. Many colleges and universities are placing orders, too – as well as small groups within universities, such as graduates in medicine. Now, they really are risque."

Sarah Butcher, who is overseeing the yearbook for Leicester University medics, laughs: "Our degree is longer and we do more hours in a day than most students do in a week, so we do spend a lot of time together. Normal boundaries dissipate, and in any case, you have to have a weird sense of humour to do this degree."

Independent schools tend to be far more cautious, says director of Meno yearbooks, Noel Harding. "Some schools allow questions such as 'Person I'd most like to have kissed' and a little light swearing, perhaps with a disclaimer at the front. But some are extremely conservative and have no swearing or references to individual teachers."

The irony is that as yearbooks become the latest educational craze in the UK, they are disappearing in the US. Traditionally taken extremely seriously (with yearbook classes in colleges, special yearbook workrooms, paid yearbook staff and even yearbook camp), they are in less demand than ever. Last spring, just short of its 120th edition, the University of Virginia's famous yearbook entitled Corks and Curls died and nobody seemed to notice. There was, reported the student newspaper, not enough funding or student interest.

The problem is that the US yearbook includes every student. With student populations ranging from high school graduates to working adults to online students, that's no mean feat, and students wind up with a book in which they don't even recognise most faces. It's also expensive, with the thick volumes (which are produced every year) now costing as much as $100.

The early editions of US yearbooks are revealing. Corks and Curls, for example, contained "statistics" of the average student's weight, height, religion, hair colour, bedtime and expenses – basically parading those who were white, male and wealthy. Those early copies also contained caricatures of black students and racist language, reports a recent article in the Washington Post. According to a history of the yearbook by Whitney Spivey, the first African American student graduated from the university in 1962, and the next year Martin Luther King spoke on campus, but neither event is documented in the yearbook. When women enrolled from 1970 onwards, there were sexist jokes until at last, five years later, the first female yearbook editor was elected.

Many people blame Facebook for the demise of yearbooks in America. But if that's the case, why are they gaining ground here? Gordon points out that the whole concept of Facebook comes from the yearbook – hence the name. "But what we've found is that people want a physical book as well. It's like Facebook frozen in time. In any case, take networking sites like Friends Reunited: who really bothers with them now, and who's to say the same won't happen with Facebook?"

One of the most popular features of UK yearbooks is that they can be collaborative. "It's my job to oversee the yearbook for year 11s, but to be honest I don't have to do much more than set the deadline for getting everything in," says Kimberly Holden, head of year at Walkden high school, Salford. "The students and the yearbook manufacturer do the rest."

Students like this democratic model more than voting in some committee or clique that focuses mainly on itself, and everyone benefits from the workload being spread across the group. Meanwhile, teachers like it because they don't have to bear the entire load. OK, you end up with photos girls posing flirtatiously in their party gear, but it's all good fun.

"Compare this with the US yearbook office, where students have their annual picture snapped in the yearbook office and, unless they're on the committee, rarely have any further input," says Mark Byron, director of Captured Memories.

Students in the UK often find themselves up against challenges, however. Ellamay Russell, a year 13 student at Dame Alice Owen's school in Potter's Bar, says: "I suggested a poll – stuff like best classmate, best person at English and so on. But someone complained that because we're going to have best brunette and best blonde, why not best black person, too? But if we did that, we'd have to include every single ethnicity, which just isn't practical. I got round it by saying surely we have to rule out anything that could be considered discriminatory. But it did get political. There's also the problem that in teen culture, everyone is quite vain and people keep changing their mind about their photo."

But students – and indeed teachers – at risk of taking it all too seriously would do well to remember the fate of yearbooks overseas.