How can you find out which are better schools in your area?

[SandyRayofSun]

Hello. I am hoping someone can help. We are looking to move house, don't have a specific area in mind, but we do need to consider primary schools (and catchment areas) as we will be applying next year for our child. I'm unsure about how to find out which are good primary schools, as this could determine where we end up moving to. We will be moving locally, so I know some schools in the area, I just don't know how to find out which the better schools are. TIA.

The gov.uk / schools website gives you an overview with performance data, which may be somewhat out of date. Visiting the school and getting a feel is the best gauge. You could also hang around near the gate at home time to get a feel for behaviour/ uniform etc.

I used locrating and it was really helpful - lots of data in one place, in one format that made it easy to compare. Was also really helpful in terms of showing heat maps of admittance distances since catchment doesn’t really mean much if schools are oversubscribed. You have to buy a subscription, but can do so one month at a time, and very easy to cancel once you have done your research.

You can use the department of education website to compare schools https://www.gov.uk/school-performance-tables for data driven things, and Ofsted reports.

However you need to define 'better'. One person's highly rated school may be another's disaster school.

All those published academic data are outdated (latest 2019 data) in gov website and locrating. You may have to wait until mid Dec to see the updated 2023 SAT data in "compare school" website.

Go and look at them too.

Thank you everyone for your super helpful responses. Looks like I have quite a bit of homework to do!

Oh, absolutely. Me and my husband were saying the same thing yesterday about how everyone's experience of every school is different, and so many things need to be taken into account. So I appreciate me saying "better" is vague.

It helps if you define what you want from a school. Do you want small, medium or large? Each has advantages and disadvantages. Do you particularly want a diverse racial mix? Does your DC have SEN, in which case a school with good SEN experience and resources would be a priority. Do you want lots of outdoor space, forest school elements? Etc etc.

A very helpful cheat is to know teachers in the local secondaries - ask them where their nicer year 7s tend to come from!

On my town’s local Facebook page there are often out of towners planning to move here who ask local parents about x, y and z schools. Why not do something like that?

Beware of these admissions heat maps - they can be very innacurate. They use distance cut-off data from Local Authority websites, and make the assumption that the admissions policies use crow-flies distances from the school site. Often schools use walking distances instead, which would give a very different heat map. Also, the heat maps use National Offer Day (March 1st) distances, rather than September distances which include waiting list movement.

Schools in my area put cut-off data on their own websites, not the LA website, so the heat maps just report that no cut-off distance data was found.