Mercedes College

Mercedes College is a Catholic, co-educational day school located in Springfield, an inner-south suburb of Adelaide, South Australia.It was established by the Sisters of Mercy in 1954, Originally a boarding school for girls, it is now a coeducational school. Mercedes is an International Baccalaureate (IB) school, and offers the PYP, MYP, and IB Diploma programmes as well as the South Australian Certificate of Education (SACE).HistoryIt was established by the Sisters of Mercy in 1954. The purchase of the 20 acre (81,000 m²) site at Springfield brought to fruition the dream of finding a healthier environment for the girls' boarding school until that time part of Saint Aloysius College in Angas street, Adelaide. With the eighty boarders on opening day were sixty day scholars, mostly girls but with a group of boys in the infant section.After twenty-one years the boarding school was phased out when rising costs and a decline in the rural economy made it financially beyond the means of the very families it was created to serve. In 1976 the school became co-educational with the first intake of boys in the Year 8 and numbers have grown.The Mercedes property was originally part of the Springfield Estate. It was sold to John Duncan, (father of Sir Walter, Speaker of the Australian House of Representatives for many years) who planned the house in 1891 and built it in 1899. The family home was named Strathspey after his childhood home in Scotland.