[2] Kensington School was established in 1830 in union with the Corporation of King's College London for the purpose "of providing an efficient course of education for youth, comprising religious and moral instruction in conformity with the principles of the Established Church, the Greek, Latin and Modern languages anc literature, History, Geography, Mathematics and such other branches of knowledge and such accomplishments as it may be practicable and advantageous to introduce."

The proprietors had taken a house on a short tenure in Kensington Square, the intention being that if after a trial period of two years the school was a success they would either take a lease or go elsewhere.

The monitorial system of teaching was employed, whereby the masters taught only the monitors who in turn passed on the instruction they had received to their schoolfellows.

By the time the school was about to take possession of the new schoolroom in January 1834, this system was abandoned in favour of the boys being divided into six separate classes.

In 1841 the school provided special courses to prepare boys for the East India Company's colleges at Haileybury and Addiscombe.

[3] By 1857, Kensington School held a high position, due to the success of its scholars at the Universities and more especially to the number of boys trained for the military services.

Although this changed in the latter half of the century, Kensington were already satisfying the requirements of parents and giving also what the Universities and military examiners wanted.

The formidable Haig Brown joined the school in 1857 instilling a sense of discipline once again and he remained at Kensington till 1863.

In 1881, Ackland resigned and soon numbers began to fall off, particularly after the opening in 1884 of St. Paul's School in Hammersmith, only one-and-a-quarter miles from Kensington Square.

The trustees, who by then had let all five houses fronting the square to private tenants, still hoped to use the back premises for educational work, and their scheme for the Kensington School of Science and Art received the approval of the Charity Commissioners in 1898 but was abandoned when the trustees found themselves unable to pay off the mortgage debt on the property.

It contributed more than one captain to the Cambridge and Oxford University elevens, and was the first school in England to institute a public "sports" day.

They tended towards the dribbling game, represented to an extent by Eton's code and which would be set down formally in Cambridge rules in 1848.

With the exception of a rationalised and uniform football culture that was emerging in Sheffield in the 1850s, across the United Kingdom from club to club and school to school there was little agreement over the elements of a football game, be that the time it should take to play, the number of players in a side, or indeed whether running with the ball was illegal or not.

In order to allow matches to take place without such constraints and problems, a number of captains and representatives from various London clubs met at Freemasons' Tavern in Lincoln's Inn Fields on 26 October 1863.

Kensington School was one of the twelve teams represented, and thus became a founder member of the Football Association.

[2] The school remained a member of the Football Association until 1871, by which time it had switched codes to rugby.

31 Kensington Square in 1831[3][6] The proprietors had taken that house on a short tenure and within a year of opening the number of pupils had doubled and the schoolroom had had to be enlarged.

At the same time two-and-a-half acres of ground was leased behind the house, previously William Cobbett's nursery, for use as a playground.

27. had always been the largest house on the west side of the square and was the second to be erected on the site and dated from 1833–4, especially built for the school.

The walls were originally painted ‘light Tea-Green’, the skirting a shade darker and the cornices lighter: the colour of the ceiling was to be either ‘a reflection of the wall’ or cream ‘as may be designed best to Harmonise the General Appearance of the Room, Observing that the prevailing color of the furniture is Red’.

The alterations at the three houses were partly intended to prepare them for letting to private tenants as the school contracted.