to consider our catchment school in deprived nearby town

[daisymoo2]

We live in an affluent village where our DC attend the very good state primary school but our catchment secondary school is in a very deprived nearby town. The catchment secondary school seems to be well led and is working hard at helping all children achieve despite the difficult catchment area but it's still bottom of the league tables for exam results.
DC1 is nearing secondary age. A number of DC1's friends will be going to the catchment secondary and DC1 wants to go there too. Our other option is the private school in the village where we live. We could manage this financially but wonder if it's really value for money and we don't want our DC becoming entitled brats.
AIBU considering sending our DC to the catchment school despite reservations about the peer group and exam results?
PS: We're in the country so these two schools are our only two options.

Should add that my DP went to the same terrible school as me and now is an academic at Oxford. I've done okay too. But let's just say we bonded all those years ago over how bullied we were for being bright.

"I'm usually not a fan of private schools. But I went to a terrible secondary school on a huge council estate"
No, you went to a terrible secondary school. It's location is irrelevant.

I was in a similar position and sent dd to the local failing comp. big mistake. She was miserable for five years. The behaviour in the classroom was unreal. To the extent the police came round here to take a witness state,ent after a kid was beaten round the head with a brick.

I was constantly ringing school up to say dd had been smacked round the head with a chair, or punched.

I guess some schools may manage behaviour better. This one certainly didn't.

She came out with good GCSEs. Couple of Cs, a B and the rest were As. But I think she would have done better elsewhere. She said the teachers focused on the kids who were borderline C/d grade and ignored the high achievers like herself. It was hard to concentrate when kids were running round the classroom shouting at the teacher to fuck off, playing tag all lesson, fighting, arsing about.

@BertrandRussell I don't think the schools location was irrelevant actually. In fact I think it was very relevant, for lots of reasons. One of which being that OP was asking about a school in a deprived area, close to an affluent area. The school I went to was also in an unfortunately deprived area (a council estate in bottom 5% of Englands most deprived neighbourhoods right next to an area filled with £1-5million houses).
In fact there are a few guardian articles about the school, all of which mention the estate location significant factor.
The school was also looked for the 1990 guardian feature - schools in crisis
"Dr Budgell found that more than 90% of the difference in exam results between schools was accounted for simply by the poverty, gender and final-year attendance of the children who were enrolled there. What was being done by the schools was influencing only the remaining 5 to 10%.
"I'm not saying that schools don't make a difference," he told the Guardian. "There are incompetent teachers, but in order to explain the failing of inner city schools in terms of incompetence you have to make the bizarre assumption that these schools have hired a mass of incompetent teachers while good schools have hired none. There is a volume of evidence that schools are not playing on a level playing field. When you look at these intake factors, the level playing field is more like the side of Mount Everest.""