Did you use School Checker on your computer or on a mobile device or tablet?
On my computer.
How old are your children if you have any?
9
How important are schools to you when planning to move home?
Extremely important.
Would you consider moving home to get into a good school?
Only if I was planning to move anyway (which I am) because I think there is a strong case for a child being happiest attending his/her catchment school.
From the Rightmove schools page (www.rightmove.co.uk/schools.html) was School Checker tab easy to find?
Yes, perfectly easy.
How easy did you find School Checker to use and understand?
Perfectly easy.
Did you find School Checker useful?
Yes. It is useful because you can use it to see which schools are near to the new house you're looking at, and you can view their Ofsted ratings.
Would you use School Checker when considering a move?
Definitely. I wouldn't even consider going to look at a new house until I knew which schools were possibilities from that house.
What did you find most useful about School Checker?
The showing of Ofsted ratings.
Any improvements you’d like to see?
I would just say that it is an extremely useful tool to show you which schools are nearby, and to give you their Ofsted ratings. The fact that they are over or underscribed is almost irrelevant because there will be very subjective, local reasons for that. For example, a school may be undersubscribed because demographically, people are moving away from that area (perhaps it's a small village) to the cities for work, or in the case of a primary school near where I live, the admissions criteria for the most popular local secondary school have changed and that primary school is no longer a 'preferred feeder', thus rendering the lovely primary school not as attractive to prospective parents anymore.
Some counties use catchment areas, so that no matter which primary school you attend, if you live in catchment for a certain secondary school, you are almost certain to get a place. Other counties use a feeder school system, so that you only get a place at a certain secondary school if you attend one of the named feeders. These things are not identifiable on the school checker. A house can show as 'inside admissions area' for a previous year, but only because families nearby happened to attend one of the feeder schools, but the house you are looking at would be out of the admissions area for the feeder school because those parents moved house once they had gained a place at the right feeder....
Would you recommend School Checker to other parents and why?
Yes, I would, because it forms the basis of your research. Once you've identified a house, and checked that it's near some good schools, you can then go to those particular schools' websites and check their admissions policies to see if they work by catchment area, or simply proximity to the school, or by feeder school. You then need to go the local county council's website and look up the data on how places were allocated in previous years, so that you know if, for example, after all children attending a feeder school were allocated a place, if there were any places allocated to children who did not attend a feeder, or did not have a sibling already attending. Then you might need to base your house search on the primary school rather than the secondary. Or vice versa - you've found a lovely primary, but it feeds into a terrible secondary....
Any other comments?
This is a really useful tool, and I wouldn't be without it. Really helpful for parents.