Projects
The Life and Death of South Australian Schools
South Australia has opened and closed schools continuously since the colony was a few decades old. Most of them are gone. Small stone schoolrooms went up in wheat country as fast as families arrived, ran for a generation on a single teacher, and closed again when the families left or the buses arrived.
I could put a few thousand of them on a map. Of those, most have a documented start and end, and it is those that move through the timeline, from the 1850s to today. Drag the year, or press play, and watch the network grow and thin out.
What did the state look like when it had the most schools it would ever have?
How many schools there were
The count below is of schools operating in each year, which is not the same as schools that ever existed. A school that opened in 1890 and closed in 1935 contributes to every year in between, and nothing after.
The high point is a number of schools in the middle of the century. Every count on this page uses only the schools whose whole life is documented. A further handful are on the map but missing a start or an end date, so they cannot be counted in any particular year; the checkbox above the map shows them as a separate grey layer.
Openings and closures
Two things are easier to see split apart than added together. The busiest single year for openings was one year, with many new schools. The busiest year for closures was another, with many.
Openings by decade
Closures by decade
Adelaide against everywhere else
A school is counted as metropolitan here if it sits within 35 km of the Adelaide GPO. That is a blunt line drawn on a map rather than an administrative boundary, and it is drawn the same way in every year so the trend is comparable even where the label is rough.
How long schools lasted
The longest and the shortest
Longest lived, now closed
Schools that ran for a century or more and then stopped.
Shortest lived
Restricted to schools where both the opening and closing year come from the catalogue's own date range, because a school that appears to have lasted two years is usually a records problem rather than a school.
Oldest still operating
Places that lost every school
Some localities in this dataset have no school left operating. Most were small farming districts that supported one schoolroom for a few decades. Turn on ghosts above and run the timeline forward to watch them go dark.
Where the data comes from
Three sources, joined on school names. None of them was built for this, and the joins are the weakest part of the work.
- State Records of South Australia. Its ArchivesSearch catalogue holds an agency record for most government schools, with a date range and a written administrative history. That history is where the opening and closing years, the closure reasons and most of the relationships between schools come from.
- The South Australian state gazetteer. Surveyed place names, including school sites both open and closed, which supplies coordinates for schools that no longer exist.
- Department for Education school sites. Today's government schools with their addresses and coordinates. This is the anchor at the modern end: if a school appears here, it is treated as still operating whatever the archival record says.
Methodology, and what this data cannot tell you
What counts as a school. A government school with its own identity in the archival record. Preschools, kindergartens, TAFE campuses and universities are excluded. Non-government schools are largely absent, because the archival series covers state schools, so this is a history of the public system rather than of schooling in South Australia.
Opening and closing years. Taken from the catalogue's date range where it gives one, and from the written history where it does not. The two sometimes disagree, and where they do the panel says so. A date range ending in "CT" means the record is still current, which is read as still open.
Renames and mergers. A school that changes its name keeps one record, because the institution continued. A school that merges into another closes, and the successor is recorded as a relationship. This is a judgement call and reasonable people draw it differently.
Coordinates. In order of preference: the department's own coordinates for schools operating today, the gazetteer's surveyed site for former schools, the centre of the locality the school was named after, and finally the centre of the hundred. Some of the mapped schools have a known site; the rest are placed at a locality or hundred centre and the panel labels them as such. A dot in the middle of a locality is not a claim about where the building stood.
What was left out, and what is only half in. Some schools could not be placed anywhere at all and are absent entirely. Part of that is deliberate: the gazetteer files every record with no surveyed position on one shared placeholder coordinate, which sits in open ocean, and the build throws those positions away rather than draw schools at sea. Others can be placed but have no opening year, mostly schools operating today that the archival catalogue has no agency record for, and a further group have an opening year but no recorded closure. Since they are not on today's list of government schools they have clearly closed, but running them to the present to make the arithmetic tidy would inflate every modern count, so they sit on the grey layer instead. The gaps are not random: obscure, short-lived rural schools are the hardest to place, so the map probably understates how many of them there were.
No enrolments. Historical enrolment figures exist in the archives but only inside unindexed records, so there are none here. Marker size carries no meaning.
Individuals. Admission registers, which name students, were deliberately not used. This is about institutions.
Data last rebuilt recently. The build pipeline and every extraction rule live in the repository, the source of each date is recorded per school, and the build writes a report of everything it could not resolve.