Do you get nice areas with rubbish schools, and vice-versa?

[UnquietDad]

Just wondered. I recalled on another thread having spoken to an estate-agent who said the key thing in what made an area "desirable" - for families, at least - was having a successful school.

Where I live, all the "best" schools (on paper) are in the areas with the most expensive houses. The nicest cars. In short, the most "middle-class" areas, if that's how you want to define it.

There must be "bohemian" places, though, where arty people who don't earn a packe live (people like me), and which still have schools where they are happy to send their children. And conversely I bet there are some horrible-looking schools from rough estates which do really well.

Any examples?

We'll never have true equality in the comprehensive system until the day the parents from the leafy suburbs are desperate to get their kids into the sink-estate school...

Well, not sure if this sort of comment is what you're after, but...
...our local primary was OFSTEDed last September and I was shocked to see that it was described in the report as 'serving a disadvantaged community'. The school is literally 50 steps from houses in the £300,000+ price range and a turned-corner from one of the borough's most affluent pockets. I don't think there is a plethora of council estates around although there are one or two quite 'dodgy' Closes. Then I looked at the pupils and saw that actually many of them would be classed as coming from a disadvantaged background - but many of them are travelling in by bus and in the case of 6 and 5 yrs old siblings by train and bus. Something is wrong here and I can't quite get my head around it. There is something of the chicken and egg going on - why is so much of school population seemingly from a disadvantaged background, is this making the local parents send their children elsewhere? or is it the reverse? Or are our 'richies' pretending to be 'poories' or what?

I think even the least in demand schools where I live would still be deemed good schools in most areas....

There is a school which most "middle-class" parents will do anything to avoid but actually has really good facilities and gets quite good results (considering many of the children speak English as a second language) in spite of it not having a truly broad spectrum of children because of this...

A lot of the single-form entry schools have very small "catchment areas" as a result and so the families attending them can be very ummm homogenous.... I don't think I would feel particularly comfortable sending my dcs to some of them, partly because I wouldn't feel comfortable socialising with people that wealthy and partly because I'd like my kids to go to school with people from a wide variety of backgrounds.

One of the pros of church schools (imo) is that they tend to have a large catchment area (even the small ones) and you get children from all sorts of backgrounds attending. Not so much variety of non-European family backgrounds but this would be rare in my area anyway...

yes
the next town along from me has a school with a lousy reputation, this is because (int he received wisdom) the parents who can afford it send their children to private schools, leaving the schools with a disproprionate number of children from low income backgrounds, and a disproportionately low perecntage of children from afluent schools, and the situation just gets worse. so the school is much worse than it "ought" to be if everyone locally sent their child there.
and then of course it gets perpetuated

UQ - .

Here in Paris, there are areas that have been colonised in recent times by the impoverished intelligentsia - arty types who themselves were mostly brought up in the bourgeois or intellectual arrondissements but whose occupations are not (yet) lucrative enough to afford to live in them as adults.

For the most part, parents in that situation start off frequenting the local state schools but sooner or later move their children to a private school further from home... Private school is, of course, much cheaper here (max EUR 6,000 a year) than in England.

UQ, do you live in London or something?

Depends on your definition of what 'best' is, I suppose. League tables - is that what you mean by on paper? Arty parents? Very narrow definitions.

Of course there are good, successful schools in areas with a mix of housing. Unless, perhaps, you live in a large city with large housing areas that all fit into one particular type.

anna - why the ?

It's a genuine question.

No, not London here. T'north.

I know a lot of the terminology is very general. I expected it would refine itself with people's answers.

UQD - Lambeth has a number of these.

The schools still have more expensive housing in the tight little area around them - but it is significantly cheaper than an equivalent area in N London.

Look on the Lambeth league tables, agg and value added, check the area, check the house prices!

Oh, for some reason, I thought you lived in Hackney!

It's the answer to your OP title question - I'm pretty sceptical that such areas exist, and answered by giving an illustration of what happens in Paris (just to show that I think my point is universal ).

I grew up in Kent and now live in Sheffield. There is a very clear division here between areas. You can map the "desirable" schools against the house prices, the crime figures, the health figures... correlation is strong between the "good" factors in every respect.

UQ - you can draw that map here in Paris, too...

Which is why so many parents choose private schools. And why the Sarkozy government has relaxed the rules on catchment areas.

Maybe this is more about your house choice rather than school choice?

Are you fussy about the sort of house you live in? You can get fairly dull boring looking houses in areas that a re good for kids and served by a good school.

anna - oh, OK, I'm never quite sure how to take a !

eur6000 a year for a private school, eh...? That must put them within a lot more people's reach than here.

You are talking about cities then.

The history of private schools in France is completely different. Not comparing liek with like

pointy - you can. But they still cost more than they are worth. Ordinary, bog-standard 3-bed terrace in S. Yorks is:

under £60K in a really, really, dog-rough area
about £110K in a rough-but-tolerable area
about £140K in an OK area
about £180K in a decent area
and
over £220K where Nick Clegg lives.

I used to live in Leeds, and quite a few of the schools on the edge of the city had very mixed intakes - including big estates and leafy lanes. I'm not sure about "bohemian", but the school in which I taught had lots of children of academics for example.

Further out in the true suburbs, and further in, the intakes were more socially homogenous IYSWIM.

It seems to me that how good a school is depends almost entirely on how involved the parents are and how much value they put on education. There might be some exceptions to this but I've yet to see one.

NQWWW I would absolutely agree with that. though there are some exceptions, it requires (imo) a really really exceptional head and leadership team
and the head usually gets burnt out in a few years

houses always cost more than they are worth, though. That's just the uk's crazy housing market. Your prices sound reasonably averagish

Actually, the real difference between state and private schools in France is that both follow the national curriculum and both have teachers' salaries paid for by the Ministry for Education.

sorry, missed out "and the UK" in my last post.

pointy - they do, but the range is huge. I imagine that in a small town or village the prices are more homogeneous and you don't get the variation in catchment "quality" either.

NQWWW - broadly true, I think.

Ditto, Harpsi

Primaries are a different bag to secondaries though, as lots of people choose state till 11 on the grounds it's cheap / close / convenient / part of the community etc (the idealised 'village school' picture), then whisk them off at 11 into the private system to avoid 'that nasty comprehensive, darling'.

This leaves certain state primaries almost on a par with local prep schools in terms of affluent / involved / attentive parents.

There is one outstanding exception though, which is in such an affluent area that every child in the surrounding streets gets driven out of town to a prep school, and the state kids are bussed in from the army base... by the prep school. Weird.