To think this is an elite school system via the back door.

[1DAD2KIDS]

There is a very good state school in my city. It has great facilities, staff and excellent (plus ever improving) results. It is a school that would give any private sector school a run for its money.

As a result a strange thing has happened over the last 10 years. It was once in a pretty average area with house prices reflecting the rest of the city. But now it is within in a bubble of masivly inflated house prices and rents within its catchment area. The difference in prices between a house that is in the catchment area and one just outside it is staggering. When a house in the catchment area is on the market it's always advertised in BOLD print in the catchment area of said school. These houses fly off the market.

It's clear what is going on here. As the middle classes have been priced out of the private sector they have found a new more affordable way to set up an elite school system. Afterall when you think about it in the long run its a far more ecconomical way to get your kids in a great school without paying private sector prices and once the kids have grown up you could sell the house on again and get the money back (or more). The demographic in the school has masivly changed over the last 10 years. Now the kids are pretty much all from well off, well educated backgrounds. It is no secret that part of the schools improving high achievement is due to change in student demographic. Also the school is not short of generous parents who donate or raise extra funds for the school. The only way to get into the school as it's soon popular is to live in the catchment area. The only way you can afford to live in that area and thus attend the school is by being well off. Even pretty much all the council housing in the area has gone through right to buy and now sells/rents at ridiculous prices.

What has happened in this case is clear. It is an elite school were you can only go to if you can afford the very expensive catchment area. A school for the well off funded by the state. There is nothing technically wrong but is there something morally wrong? Is it in the spirit of the state school system to have an excellent state school were only those wealthy enough can attend due to catchment area? Or is it just another obstical to social mobility?

[RidingWindhorses]

nobody is pushed out as every child in our town goes to the same secondary. There's no argument that says if you can afford private education you should take it. That's ridiculous! I'd rather take the excellent free education I get as a tax payer

I'm sure you would.

There may be enough places for all the children in your town to attend that school irrespective of wealth, but you may have noticed from the OP and some of the replies, that elsewhere people are being priced out of catchment areas of good schools by rich middle classes.

I'm not judging you btw, simply pointing out this is part of the phenonomen OP describes.

[RidingWindhorses]

having £250k to invest in a house which will likely keep its value and and you can sell on is v v different to have 250k to spend on school fees.

What you mean is it's less financially savvy if you want to hold onto your money - I can't disagree with that.

[InvisibleKittenAttack]

Actually on house prices, our school has been on a massive funding drive as they've been having huge building works, which have been mainly raised by donations. There was some local complaints to the planning, until the school held a meeting for residents, then got a local estate agent to stand up and say that these changes would make this the most desirable state school in the town, and probably add 10% to the value of each of their properties.

Suddenly, locals didn't mind the distruption of the building work, and I have noticed that as it's just finishing, several houses on the road next to the school have gone on the market for what feels to me like a very crazy price for the size of house...

[20nil]

The point of the lottery system is precisely to help make struggling schools better, not to isolate them.

But even great schools can’t solve chronic social problems of course.

[Headofthehive55]

I find it strange because I live in one of those average places. There are no other schools within reasonable distance, so most attend the local school. It's very mixed in demographic. It's not the utopia that you imagine.
Children generally mix with their own demographic.
There aren't enough children playing instruments to create much of a band. I think the middle class and more academic children suffer and the less well off aren't helped.
I don't even think we have a PTA.
It is considered a fairly good school.

[PoppyPopcorn]

My understanding that the system in Scotland is very much, you just attend your local school. How does the Scottish system prevent the situation described by the OP developing?

It does develop in an even more acute way. Catchment areas are set - you can in many cases go onto the council website and see exacrly which streets fall into which school's catchment area. These are set, and very rarely change. So you know that if you buy in Oak Avenue that's in the catchment for Chestnut Primary, then Birch High School. That won't change. If Chestnut Primary and Birch High School are doing well, high performing, lots of kids going to Oxbridge, your house in Oak Avenue will command a premium.

Look at these two properties which are, on the face of it, very similar:

www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-49604118.html (Bearsden, £525,000)

www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-68648183.html (Drumchapel, £235,000)

What explains the £300,000 price difference? Well, you could argue that the first one is done to a higher standard and has a fancy new extension and you'd be right. The first is in catchment for the state secondary school which was recently voted Best in Scotland. The second is less than a mile away as the crow flies, but is on the edges of an area of deprivation where the school exam results are some of the worst in Glasgow.

In Scotland most children do go to their local school. Parents can put in a "placing request" if they wish their child to go somewhere else but this will only be accepted if there is space for them after all of the catchment area children have been placed. The schools my kids are at are very good/popular and last year very, very few placing requests were accepted as the school is getting full. So if you want to guarantee a place, you have to buy/rent in catchment. It used to be in the past that you could take a risk on that £235k house and assume you have a good chance of getting into the high achieving school, but no longer.

[OrlandaFuriosa]

Two additional points:

Don't assume that league tables necessarily make a huge difference.

The historically poor school round the corner, that has been transformed, was dreadful well before league tables. It wasn't bad purely on the basis of academic standards, either. Once a school has a poor reputation it takes years to rebuild; in the meantime it has spare places, those get used in year by kids needing placing or for overspill from other areas. Round here, word of mouth at the school gates appears to be more influential than league tables; I can think of a rural eg too where a school with a good reputation for SEN but the same Value added as another more academic school is more popular than the latter. It's very good news that it has improved so much recently (after our time).

The second point is that many parents are prepared to make sacrifices to pay for their children's education. That might mean renting, not owning. It might mean, as it has with us, not spending the money on a mortgage to move into a "good" catchment area, where the property would prob have at least retained and more likely increased its value, meaning that at our deaths it could be sold for value and the wealth transmitted to another generation, rather than seeing it vanish in this.

Ironically, perhaps, the result has been that the school we have paid for has a far greater socio economic, religious and racial mix than the homogeneous local comprehensives based on catchment areas, which was a massive advantage in our eyes.

[OrlandaFuriosa]

Whoops, final sentence of second major para refers to local improved school, not the rural ones.

[Turbinaria]

My Dsis lives in a very naive middle class area of a big city her dcs went to an outstanding primary school. She became totally disillusioned with it even though it was high in the league tables and her dcs did well. She said it was outstanding because of the following rather than what the school actually did:

1. dcs who had SEN were "encouraged" by the headmaster to transfer to other schools to meet their needs as he said they couldn't be catered for in mainstream schools
   
2. most parents were educated professionals and were supportive of their dcs education so homework and reading were always done
   
3. the state secondary school provision was a mixed bag so parents would routinely have their dcs tutored from year 3 onwards for private and grammar schools in the next county. This benefitted the year 6 school SATS results
   
4. parents were very active in organising extracurricular activities for their dcs which if they were any good at the school could also bask in their glory
   Unsurprisingly although the school retained their outstanding at their last Ostend report their added value score is only average

[Turbinaria]

Naice not naive

[Ttbb]

No shit

[Oldie2017]

It's always going to be difficult. Most parents want the best for their children and that's wonderful. No one should criticise that ever. What for one family is best - eg 100% devotion to the faith or going into the family bakery at 15 or whatever is best in that individual family ethos will differ.

For us being a very musical family I wanted them singing difficult choral music at 7 in latin for example which of course you can do in the state system if you join the right church choir at weekends but is definitely harder to find in state schools so I paid fees from when the children were 4 and always worked full time 9I am not saying that is the only thing I wanted. I also wanted single sex education from 4 too which again most parents don't want or like) and I also wanted selective academic school from age 4 which again many parents are aagainst. In other words we all have different things we are after. I quite liked schools with parents' choirs singing Bach etc I could join and it's quite nice to have some lawns and lakes for events with parents not that I'd put the lawns or number of teachers who went to Oxbridge top of the list of my requirements by any means.

Like many parents I wanted the children to be happy at school and find that one thing they could be good at whcih can be qutie hard to find in some children which might make them feel good about themselves and which all schools try to find in individual children. I was not too bothered about clsas sizes as I think lots of bright children in one class working at the same standard on the same work work fine in fairly big classes and you have more ideas to spark off each other. Not interested in CCF etc as am fairly pacifist but glad they could do a lot of sport and D of E later on.

In our area if you pay fees you get racial and religious mix and if you don't pay fees parents segregate by colour and religion and thus race on the whole which is very different from some other areas of the country I expect.

[1DAD2KIDS]

Of course race and it's relation to housing is another issue with schools being less diverse. In my city certain racial groups have tended to stick to certain neighbourhoods of the city and thus certain schools have a very narrow diversity. These kids rarely get to mix with kids from other backgrounds. This also continues the cycle of some communities remaining isolated and inward looking. Not engauging with the wider society and reenforcing attitudes and predogists sometimes at odd with the values of wider society. But that is probably the realms of another debate.

[Shemozzle]

Have you only just noticed? It's not a phenomenon of your area I'm afraid.

[Fortybingowings]

Where I’m based the council have just changed the system to stop religious gaming to get into a local secondary. Parents can no longer ‘hedge their bets’ waiting to see if they’re deemed devoted enough for a place at the church school, while simultaneously applying for the good secondary down the road. You apply for one or the other via different systems now. If you fail to get the church school then it’s to the back of the queue for a likely place at the inadequate school across the city!

[1DAD2KIDS]

Fortybingowings I guess some parents will be pulling out all the stops to get into church schools now. The risk of failure is too high.

[NewDaddie]

@1DAD2KIDS the classic example of that was The Charter School in Dulwich. Like many parts of London you have very affluent areas juxtaposed with social housing estates. They thought they could get away with drawing a neat little catchment map excluding the estates. It was actually shocking.

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/education/2012/feb/01/academy-school-catchment-council-estates

Now apparently they don't have a catchment area.

Like fuck they don't.

[OddBoots]

Fortybingowings - interesting, what country is that in? I didn't realise the school allocation rules allowed such a system in England but you might be talking about elsewhere. It seems sensible.

[BoysofMelody]

And in many cases, the notion of somewhere being an excellent school is a self perpetuating myth. In many cases the excellent reputation isn't due to the quality of the teaching, but its reputation attracting the parents with the sharpest elbows and the deepest pockets. It is educational apartheid in all but name.

[BertrandRussell]

Fourty- that sounds like a brilliant idea- what country are you in?

[NK493efc93X1277dd3d6d4]

Well we scrimped, scraped & borrowed to move into the catchment for good schools.
In all honesty part of the attraction was not having too many low income families attending. It isn't their income I object to - I grew up on a council estate myself. It is the difference in behaviour and attitude of many which disrupts so many schools.
The few disadvantaged kids at my children' secondary cause more trouble than all the rest put together. Most of the fighting, swearing, answering back, stealing, bullying etc seem to be down to the same few kids.
We are one of the poorest families at this school and the children are aware of this. However I would rather that than attend a school with higher numbers of disruptive or unfocussed children.

[Lurkedforever1]

Of course it's shit. But unlike grammars, selection by house price and religion will always guarantee a good school for mc and wealthy dc so it's unlikely to ever change.

Lottery wouldn't work in every area, so I'd just fund schools based on intake. Mainly deprived dc, high funding, mainly mc dc, low funding. Religious schools are easy, you just ban religious criteria from admissions.

Nk I call bollocks. I bet anything that the few disadvantaged kids don't cause all the trouble.

[ottersHateFeminists]

I guess Corbyn's Marxist revolution with all property seized and then owned by the state is the only way forwards.

[Oldie2017]

Why would disadvantage not cause some children to be trouble at school? The disadvantage might come from wealth parents neglecting children but on the whole children from families with lots of problems, over crowding, parents on drugs etc are likely to be disruptive at school. That doesn't mean we should not help those children of course but it does mean we should not let them (whatever home they are from) disrupt classes for other children.

[KatyN]

I live in a whole town that’s like that. Just outside a big city, all the schools are excellent (5 primaries 1 secondary). House prices are crazy.