In 1847 Dr Newton Adams established an educational centre near Amanzimtoti, KwaZulu-Natal, under the auspices of the American Board of Missions. In time it constituted a high school, an industrial school and a teachers’ training college. It was named Adams College in 1934.

James Heald, a member of the British Parliament and wealthy Methodist layman, contributed money to establish a training institute for ministers of the Methodist Church, which opened in 1855. Healdtown Institute, as it became known, developed into a leading educational institution.

Inanda Seminary was founded in 1869 by the Revd Daniel Lindley of the American Board of Missions. It became the first secondary school in Southern Africa exclusively for African girls.

In 1875 Swiss missionaries Ernest Creux and Paul Berthold established Lemana school near Rossbach in what is now Limpopo Province. In 1922 a new high school and teacher training institute was opened at the Elim Mission, not far from the present location of the school.

St Matthew’s Mission came into being in 1854, through the efforts of Anglican Bishop Armstrong, the visionary founder of St Matthew’s; Chief Socishe, who donated the land; and Charles Taberer, the ‘father’ of what the mission became. It is situated five kilometres outside Keiskammahoek in the Eastern Cape.

Tiger Kloof Educational Institution was founded in 1904, when the London Missionary Society decided to open a school that was more accessible than the Kuruman Mission where the first schoolroom north of the Orange River was built in 1829. Twelve kilometres south of Vryburg, the Revd WC Willoughby built what would become known as a ‘school of presidents and carpenters’.