Formally, SACHES was established in 1991 at the annual conference of the Kenton Education Association (KEA), a general education society with which it has retained close links, and even overlapping memberships. The organization, guided by its founders Harold Herman, Peter Kallaway, David Gilmour and Crain Soudien, came into being as both a comparative and history of education society.  Its founders felt the need for a society that would devote itself to the issues of comparison and history because, critically, especially with respect to the former, none of the existing societies in the region paid particular attention to the issues of CE. KEA, the leading English-speaking education association, focused its work on curriculum and sociology of education.

The establishment of SARE as a peer-reviewed journal was an important initiative in SACHES. The journal was preceded by conference proceedings edited by Herman and Bergh (1995) and formally emerged under the editorship of members led by Kallaway at the University of the Western Cape in 1995. The journal has subsequently come to be published in conjunction with an important journal devoted to alternative education in the region, Education with Production, the vehicle of the eponymously named movement in the region under the leadership of the renowned educationist Patrick van Rensburg, who was also elected as the society’s first Honorary Fellow.