please recommend some areas or schools

[reallyjustme]

Hi, I hope you can help. We are moving from Birmingham to Gloucestershire. We need to live within about 10 miles of Gloucester Royal Hospital and in the direction of Cirencester. We have no idea about where to start looking for a house and I am hoping you can help. We have an almost 3 year old son and a 6 month old daughter. We are looking to buy the 'forever house' to see us through junior and senior schools. I was wondering if someone could suggest some areas that we could look at. We obviously care about the state schools, we'd like to be quite rural (I think) but if this is totally out of our price range (approximately £400K for a 4+ bed house is our budget) we would like a small town. Can anyone suggest anywhere to start looking please?

How about Churchdown? Right direction, and my bil/sil live there and are very happy.

Cirencester is a nice town with good schools and excellent secondary schools.
If it is a bit far, then you are probably looking at one of the villages. There are lots of nice villages with good schools.

As a rule, Gloucester will be cheaper than Ciren and the villages will be more expensive than both.

The road form Cirencester to Gloucester has a massive bottle neck. You go up a steep hill from the Severn Plain to the Cotswolds. At the top of the hill is a roundabout called the Air Balloon. From Ciren to Gloucester the road before the roundabout goes down to one lane and there is a traffic jam every morning. So when calculating travel times, make sure you take rush hour into account.

Thank you. Churchdown wasn't somewhere we'd considered.... I'll look now

My husband knows that particular bottleneck WELL! It's where he calls home (handsfree) every morning...(he commutes from Birmingham to Cirencester at the moment!)

Thanks

For £400k I think you could get a 4 bed house in Hatherley in Cheltenham. Good primary and secondary schools there, plus you can get to Gloucester easily and also head down the A46 and head to Cirencester from there too (there is no avoiding the air balloon though unfortunately). Cheltenham is great if you have young children - always lots going on and nice parks etc. Hatherley in particular because it's the right side of town for getting to Gloucester and housing isn't quite as expensive as the other parts of town which are seen as desirable school areas.
You could also look at Brockworth just outside Gloucester - much cheaper housing here than anywhere in Cheltenham or surrounding villages but it's still a nice place to live - the secondary school there doesn't have a great reputation but I think a lot of the children go to the secondary in Churchdown instead.
Gloucester city itself is even cheaper and has some nice suburbs (despite Gloucester's bad reputation) and good primary schools, but there seems to be a real problem with secondary schools (unless you can get in to grammar) so probably not the place to buy a 'forever' house.
Finally have you looked at Stroud? I don't know much about the area hopefully someone else can give you a bit of info about it. As someone else on the thread has already said - the villages are mostly very expensive (picturesque Cotswold stone villages are very lovely but the only people who can afford to live in them are the elderly and those who have moved from London) so I would be concentrating my search on the towns if you want a big 4 bed house.