Do people REALLY move house to get into a good school?

[Ijustwanttoretire]

Apparently 'The average house value in England is £247,000 but parents face taking on loans of up to £180,000 more to live near a top-rated school.' Really? Does your average family move house to get into a better senior school? £180000 would buy a decent house where I live, let alone paying that much extra to get into a good catchment area. So how many MNers have ACTUALLY done this?

I have just looked on rightmove and the price bracket 240-250K will buy you a 2 bedroom apartment or a 3 bedroom retirement flat in the area I mentioned above. if I drop the lower £240K I get 1 single house 1 bedroom right on the highstreet with no garden.

Yes, we did it. We were going to move eventually anyway but we rented a house near to the school and later bought one in the area

Yes they really do

I don’t think the average family does this but school catchment fraud is enough of an issue in our area that you have to show lots and lots of documents at application (think a year’s worth of gas and electric statements showing you use enough to be in residence full time, accounting for the number of occupants).

Some parents will almost certainly be moving closer to their preferred school to improve the odds of a place (we have a state girls that consistently makes national top 3 for results in the borough).

We moved before primary and before secondary - not the only factor for either move but ensuring there were good state schools within walking distance was important to us. One has SN so its harder to find a good match.

Hooraysuperworm...you probably live in the same area as me ! The annoying practice that should be clamped on is people ‘renting ‘ property very close to these schools just to get their children in . It is so wrong because it pushes out genuine residents who are paying for huge mortgages and sacrificing other luxuries for their kids to get a decent education. It is so wrong and the local education authority are not doing enough to clamp down on this immoral practice! We as a family were directly effected by this and it took a lot of fighting to get our DD into the local grammar school because she had been pushed out by the renters ...we live less than 2.5 miles from the school.

Yes, the first thing other school parents said about the house we were renting was that it would get us into two popular secondary schools (this was when the children were in reception!) and we did buy it in the end. DD also got into one of the popular schools, although in the intervening years another school shot up the rankings and we were slightly too far from that one!

Also, the house we sold when we relocated was near two good schools and that was a factor for people offering, one already had a child attending one of them.

we live less than 2.5 miles from the school

We didn’t get into our local primary. We live less than 0.6 miles from the school....

Now she goes to a selective grammar and she travels 13 miles to school so she probably did get a place over someone who lived closer, however that was academically and not on distance.

What other reason did you think house prices are so much more expensive in some areas than others?

We moved last year, the schools I went to as a child I always pictured my child going too but now it’s horrendous really bad knife crime! Only last year a teenage girl was arrested for trying to stab a supervisor it makes my blood run cold. We have moved somewhere with better schools for that reason alone.

I am sure that in some areas it might be justified but I do think many parents based their judgement on school through biased information.

When I moved in with OH, I assumed the kids would go to the outstanding closest school. As it turned out, it was totally oversubscribed and they were given a place in a school that was under remedial measures. I wasn't happy at all and looked at all options to avoid it.

In the end, I was encouraged to visit the school and we loved it. They had a new headteacher and I had good vibes from it. 4 years later and they school got the top SATS results and an Ofsted report of good. Meanwhile the other school saw their excellent headteacher leave and two years later was on remedial measures.

Most kids ended up in the same secondary schools but the difference between abilities was striking.

Similar to secondary schools, some parents took drastic steps to make sure their kids went to the best school, but years later, these kids didn't get better results in GCSEs/A levels all in all than those who went to the local school.

It's easy to 'sell' a school, it doesn't mean kids will inevitably perform much better going there or be happier.

Yes. I know of a couple of areas where this is relatively commonplace. Some SW London boroughs have a shortage of school places and sometimes people move to be able to get into any school within a reasonable distance rather than face being sent out of borough.

In Central/South Manchester there is also a bit of an exodus into Trafford "for the grammar schools". No-one moves for the secondary moderns making up 75% of the school places there though .

Blimey! I can possibly understand it in the SE but not so much in the rest of the country. The question is, how do you know a school is good in a particular area - apart from the Ofsted reports - word of mouth, visits? I think I have read of cases where an Outstanding school hasn't been inspected for years and when they did it was deemed inadequate, so that could have been a costly mistake! The town where I live all the senior schools (4) are all similar standard - so not sure how far we would have had to have moved to get an outstanding one!

A family in our village rented out their house for a year during Year 6 of their sons primary and rented another near the selective Grammar they wanted them to go to. They passed the 11+, got in the school using the new address, then upped and left and went back to their original house halfway through Year 7.

Catchment for good schools is such a selling point round here that's it's always the first thing you'll see in the estate agent's blurb - "3 bed house in catchment for X primary and Y secondary" before anything about the garden, layout, kitchen or anything.

I think people make housing decisions based on a number of factors, schools being part of it.

When we bought our current home, we ruled out some lovely properties because the secondary catchments were really poor and had been struggling (all but failing) for 5-10 years with no sign of improvement. House prices are influenced by push and pull factors. Being close to good schools is going to make some houses more appealing than others to some people.

I thought that most people considered the local amenities when buying a house, and school catchment is a major part of that. I'm lucky because my house is in the catchment of one of the best schools in the region, is within walking distance of most of the places I want to go, has good public transport links, and was also one of the cheapest houses available in the city when we bought it, so it isn't necessarily the case that good catchment automatically means super-expensive house.

We moved to get into a good secondary school catchment. I know two other people who did.

I can possibly understand it in the SE but not so much in the rest of the country

Why would it be different in the SE to any other part of the country? Most areas have good/bad schools.

Yes we did.

It has been totally worth it. Top school at the end of the road , our children have such a lovely quality of life .

We chose to live in a rd where a top primary and a top comp were literally minutes away.

It is possible to be on the same street and miss a place

Sibling policy can make it tough

We were lucky with primary as it was a low birth rate year and every head i spoke to out of catchment said we would get in that year. Dc1 got in out of catchment and dc2 also then did as a sibling and other criteria.

For secondary, as it is a church school, it covers almost the whole town so we wont have an issue and it is a good, comprehensive school. I know this for sure. I know staff there. I have relatives there. Ive working connections there. Staff send their own children.

However, i am very tempted to move five minutes away across the border into a completely different catchment area to get an outstanding high school. dh doesn't like change. He is the issue The difference i feel is that the aspirations of the school are higher in what they expect from the students. It is a significantly more m/c area. Theres more of a focus on the future iykwim.

It happens everywhere but personally I moved to an area I intended to stay in permanently (admittedly a cheap crap rental flat at the beginning) so I considered all the schools/job opportunities for the future despite my eldest child being newborn, I couldn’t imagine getting to the late stage of considering schools and then moving areas and upheaving settled lives it just wasn’t for me.

We didn’t get into any of the five (!!!) primary schools within 1 mile of our house. most of them have an intake of less than 0.5 of a mile (0.2 of a mile in the extreme), and massive problems with school traffic / too many cars at drop of . Why? because people move house as soon as the oldest child has a space.

Yup, I'm in the middle of doing exactly that. We have a few reasons for moving (lack of a garden being another) but the catchment area factor has been huge in determining the area in which we are buying.