After Walter Bromley's classes on Kangaroo Island in 1836, J.B. Shepherdson's Adelaide school 'for all classes'

A plaque on North Terrace, Adelaide, near Morphett Street bridge, marks the site of the school opened in 1838 by John Bank Shepherdson, sent out from England by the South Australian School Society. 

Walter Bromley, for 25 years an agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society, conducted South Australia’s first classes when he assembled 24 children under a “beautiful currant tree” at Reeve’s Point near Kingscote, Kangaroo Island, in December 1836.

Bromley had arrived in Kangaroo Island on the Duke of York, one of the nine ships bringing first European settlers to South Australia.

Trained, like Bromley, by the British and Foreign Bible Society, John Bank Shepherdson, arrived, also via Kangaroo Island, in Adelaide in 1837.

Shepherdson was sent out by the South Australian School Society, one of two groups concerned with education set up in London before the colony's settlement. The other group was the South Australian Literary Association (later the South Australian Literary and Scientific Association).

Shepherdson called a meeting at Trinity Church on North Terrace, Adelaide, in January 1838, to discuss setting up a school in Adelaide “for all classes”.

That school, in the South Australian Banking Company’s former wooden premises, was set up in 1838 opposite Trinity Church, with 83 students: “Nine were learning the alphabet, six to spell and read words of two letters, others to spell words of two or three syllables… Eighteen were being taught to write on paper and 65 on slate”.

When this original school became inadequate, land owned by the South Australian Company and fronting North Terrace on Stephens Place was made available to its committee to build a new school.

Construction started but was delayed by a common problem: lack of funds coming from England. Some parents, disgusted at the delay in getting a new building, withdrew their students from crowded original school. This caused the original school to shut down for four months in 1841 until it reopened in a suitable building in Light Square, Adelaide.