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?

My ds's school had quite a few children who were registered as living at their grandparents' houses. Then you'd see their parents pull up at the school run frazzled because of the one hour round trip to collect them.

There are lots of people referring to London ‘catchments’ so this is your perennial reminder that London boroughs, and many other parts of the country, do not use catchment areas. Catchment areas are defined in advance and do not change without consultation. Living within a true catchment will place your application in a higher priority bracket for those schools which use them. Most London schools (not including those who use lotteries etc) operate admissions by distance but living in the admissions area for 2017 does not give you priority for 2019 and onwards, and these areas will change year-to-year with the birth rate, sibling numbers, bulge classes etc.

I know it sounds pedantic but people assume that ‘catchment’ will give them priority and it often doesn’t. Many LAs who do use true catchments now refer to them as ‘priority areas’ to avoid confusion.

Yes. Happens all the time at the DC’s school. Most of these people stay. Some move back to a cheaper area once they get their youngest child’s school place confirmed. No idea why the school aren’t on to it. We lived here anyway!

ThanksItHasPockets
That's true, though even in areas like mine the admission by distance is essentially a catchment. If you live in town A then you're pretty much guaranteed a place at Town A High.
If you're in an area of a town then because of most primaries still feeding into old school catchment secondaries then the majority of people will still typically go on old catchment lines.

So we ruled out houses where we knew distance and old catchment would mean poor schools in most situations.

Nb I also didn't really focus on OFSTED. I looked at actual attainment & school data included in dofE league tables.

@LolaSmiles absolutely, and it sounds like you did your homework and were knowledgeable about the system in your LA. I’m on a crusade against the incorrect use of ‘catchment’ for those people who are told by the estate agent that the house is ‘in catchment’ for St Mildred’s only to find in three years’ time that they are actually in an admissions black hole!

We moved when ds was 2 (had only 1bed and a box room up till then). Schools were a big factor in choosing our house. Not just are they “good” but we both work so it was can we organise our lives to get there and back every day for the next 13 years and is there childcare for the primary years. We bought a smaller house that would let us walk to a nice school with breakfast and afterschool club. That daily convenience is easily worth a “spare” bedroom or character features.

I’m amazed you’re surprised. There is a reason rightmove has a school checker function with links to ofsted status and catchment distance.

ThanksItHasPockets

You’re absolutely right. I only use the term catchment as it’s something that everybody uses and seems to then know what I mean. Re my previous post, ‘catchments’ where we are average out at approx 100m. But no, they’re not true catchments. Someone I know’s teen went to my young children’s primary. ‘Catchment’ then was not an issue and they were 20 mins walk away. When we moved for my eldest son to get in, the previous year’s cut-off was 96m! Now my kids are all in the school, but every year I hear about the catchment. It varies from that 96m to approx 120m. None of it means anything because one year you could move 100 metres away and it could go back down to 96. It’s dependent on so many factors. At our school, siblings are given priority over distance and not measured as siblings X distance. Which make it even more enticing for people who move close to school for the reception entry, as they can move away and still get siblings in.

I haven’t moved house for this and my LB is only 9 weeks old but when we bought our house 2 years ago we chose the area we wanted which also had good schooling. House prices for the area 10 mins drive from ours are a lot lower but the schooling is also not great.

ThanksItHasPockets
I teach in the area I live so have a reasonable idea of which areas go to which school, which schools are oversubscribed every year, where might not be in the old catchment but would probably be more advantageously located for the distance criteria than some places that were in the old catchment.

I agree with you about estate agents though. It's one thing pointing out proximity to good schools and quite another to suggest that houses automatically get you in somewhere (even if for some areas it's probably a given).

Interesting point re the use of the word 'catchment' in relation to London schools

I used that word in my post further up- what I think what I really meant was 'distance from school'

Each year this can vary depending on- looked after children, siblings and also an extra class formed when there is a particularly big year

So even if Rightmove shows that the property was a 'safe' distance to get your child into the school in 2018, it might not necessarily be the case this year

We're still in the never ending process of looking to buy in SE London

I know for a fact we'll put schools at the top of our list, even if that likely means we buy a property that doesn't quite meet our current needs eg 2 bedrooms instead of 3

Yes, I think loads of people take into account catchment area when looking at houses.

We're in Scotland though where catchments are actually fixed.

Op, our "in special measures" catchment secondary school have significantly lower GCSE maths grades than the national average, helped in part by a lack of staff recruitment meaning they taught GCSE maths with a PE teacher. They are now being propped up by a local college who are offering remedial maths support to Yr 12 students who have been failed by the school. Want to swap OP? Go on, I'm sure your children will be fine getting on in life with inadequate GCSE grades and no GCSE maths. You really can't see why parents move to get away from this? Five years ago we had 2 good secondaries we could get kids into. Now we can't get into one, and you wouldn't choose the other. Of course you move if you are otherwise failing your kids' education.

I haven't, but I looked at the schools before we bought our house.

There was a catholic primary school 7 minutes walk away and as we're catholic it was a bonus being so close.

I know ppl who have moved...or rather pretended to move by renting a place in order to have the proof of address, but they didn't actually move. Just kept it empty.

Another family i know rented in the catchment area, moved in. Then rented out their own house. Once their DD got accepted, they gave the tenants notice to move out. Then moved back to their own home.

A friend divorced her DH for a reason linked to this. He gambled away the money they had saved to move to a better catchment area and they could no longer afford move, so their plans for the DC were scuppered.

She lost trust and it was game over after this.

We'll likely be moving soonish to an area with better secondaries. Bristol/South Glos has such horrible secondaries that even if we get dd into the one school we're happy with, that the commute to it is such a pain we might even then still consider moving.

Yes they do. Families have rented our house (when we were overseas and renting it out) just for six months in the past to ensure they were on the school roll before buying further away.
When we bought our last house we based our search area on the catchment of the secondary school we wanted DC to go to.

pumkinspicetime
Many councils have wised up to this now and require lots of documentation regarding the move.

I think it's also worth keeping the distinction clear between people buying and legitimately moving house with schools being a factor in the decision (totally legal and legitimate and understandable) and admissions fraud such as renting short term to gain entry on false grounds.

Parents who do the former are doing nothing wrong. The latter group are depriving children of their rightful places in schools

It can be a big gamble, schools can change so rapidly. I know people who moved specifically to get the DC's into a certain school and the school went into special measures, whilst my youngest 2 were there... we didn't move..

My eldest went to what was then the worst performing school in Birmingham, it was a much smaller school where she felt comfortable (Autism although we didn't know it at the time) Within 2 years the school had a waiting list and was flying high.

Worst thing I did was to send the younger ones to the supposed better school.

That said though if a child wants to learn and do well they will.. Eldest has just finished uni with a good degree, middle is in sixth form at the best performing school in the area and youngest is looking at studying medicine..

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

If you have the cash and nous to move areas for schools, how is that different from using the same cash and nous to pay for your child's education directly?

In my case, it's because the parents in my street, in the catchment area of an outstanding school, are some sort of admin person, a rubbish collector, unemployed/disabled and on benefits, a graphic designer, a pharmacist, a shop assistant, a headteacher, a cleaner, a nurse, a software engineer, a plumber, a small business owner, a personal trainer and a care assistant. That's not a group of people whose kids would all be going to an independent school if they just moved house.

@BroomstickOfLove, obviously it varies across the country, but I live in inner London. There is a shrinking amount of social housing. Lots of people take on an enormous mortgage or rent to be in the catchment of a good state school.

I don't blame these people. There's an exceptionally strong urge to do your best for your children. It drove us to pay school fees for one of our children. The other was attending an excellent state secondary school, which was single sex, so wasn't available to our other child. If we'd moved house we'd have disrupted our older child, which in our particular circumstances we thought would be unwise.

I'm just saying that where people have only been able to get a good state school place because they are extremely well off or so well educated that they can understand and get the best out of the system, they are really not occupying the moral high ground. For every place taken by a child from a wealthy family who paid an inflated price to live a few metres from the school gate, there is another child who didn't get a place. And yet so often in debates about the morality of paying school fees people who've sent their children to state school do indeed portray people like us as tainted and people like them as socially responsible.

Long ago, back in the 1970s when I was in my teens, this sort of thing didn't really happen. People were far more likely to send their children to the nearest school, not least because it was difficult to do anything else. But then Mrs Thatcher introduced market forces to education in the form of parental preference, SATS league tables and Ofsted reports, and that was the end of that. What a shame that the focus was not on ensuring that all schools were good.

Nope we didnt, and i dont personally know anyone that did

We do live in the catchment area of what were good infant/junior schools and a good senior school or at least they were

Yes, this is commonplace where I live, people either buy or rent in catchment and will move house from primary to secondary if necessary.
People also commit fraud to get into schools.

I think many do. We didn't but we moved to a better area before kids as we didn't want to bring up our DCs where we first lived. When we moved here, the primary school seemed fine but the local secondary was terrible, now it's the best in the borough, pure dumb luck that it is walking distance.

Indirectly, I did.
My house cost £375K, I could have had the same except for the huge garden 15 minutes drive into the city for £200K. Post divorce, I bought at £150K and could have had similar 10 miles away for £100K.

School catchment area (future planning) was a definite factor in that. Although also, so was living on a tree lined village road with a fancy pub, and no drug dealers on the corners.