Gardens Commercial High School is a coeducational inner city Secondary School in Cape Town, South Africa with learners aged 12 – 18 years. In 2006 the school was designated a Business, Commerce and Management (BCM) Focus School. As such, Gardens Commercial is part of an education intervention that aims to redress the Apartheid education system. The school is a lead institution that supports learners with exceptional interest, talent, interest or aptitude in the field of business, commerce and management. Gardens Commercial offers the following focus field subjects: Accounting, Business Studies, Economics and Computer Applications Technology.HistoryGardens Commercial High School is a fine mixture of the old and the new. The five original houses which still form parts of the school buildings were built in 1882 and were used as University of Cape Town residences during the 1920s. Since then they have housed a private hotel, the offices of the Provincial Administration (1939–1944) and the offices of the Department of Inland Revenue and the Rent Control Board (1944–1967).In 1967 the demolition of Avenue Terrace - as the buildings were then known - was planned. In its stead a new school would be built to house the pupils from the Day School of Commerce which, until then, had been a department of the Cape Technical College. These plans, however, were shelved and the original buildings were adapted for use as a school.In 1968 the school came under the jurisdiction of the Cape Education Department and a year later it was renamed Gardens Commercial High School. The Avenue Terrace buildings survived intact, a second time, when demolition plans were again mooted.
