Sisters of the Church from England start St Peter's Girls School in North Adelaide in 1894; Stonyfell move in 1957

St Peter's Girls School students, with St Peter's Cathedral in the background, at the school's former Kermode Street, North Adelaide, site, in 1936.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia

St Peter’s Girls School was opened in Norh Adelaide in 1894 by the Community of the Sisters of the Church, a group of English women arriving with little more than a vision for quality girls’ education. The school was opened by the Anglican sisterhood with four pupils at Kermode Street. 

The school moved to Stonyfell in 1957. In 1949, the school had bought the Ferguson family’s 14-room Chiverton House, as well as 3.6 hectares around the Hallett Road property in Adelaide's eastern suburbs that was given to the South Australian government for environmental heritage. The Sisters of the Church (under Sister Scholastica, a previous student) handed over the running of the school to a board of governors in 1986. The school’s first lay head, Elizabeth Pike, was appointed in 1969, followed by Douglas Stott and Dianne Nicholls who saw the start of continuing development and growth at the school.

The original St Peter’s Girls School was one of a cluster of private schools in Adelaide city and North Adelaide during the second half of the 19th Century. In 1864, there were six North Adelaide schools in Archer, Gover, Jeffcott and Tynte streets, as well as G. W. Moore's, Mrs Woodcock’s and Mrs F. Sheridan's school (MacKinnon Parade). Between the 1870s and 1920s, Queen's and Whinham colleges for boys opened in North Adelaide. Tormore House,

Creveen and Wilderness School for girls were within the city square mile. In the tradition of dame schools and many other small private schools from early settlement, in the 1870s at Margaret Street, North Adelaide, a small ladies school operated in the private home of spinster Eliza Lewin. The falling city population after World War I and the 1930s Depression saw most city schools close or move into the suburbs by 1950. Wilderness had moved to Medindie in the late 1880s.