Guildford High School (GHS) and Surrounding Areas (House Move)

[sdeb]

Our DD has been offered a place in Guildford Girls School (GHS). She will be starting reception classes (Junior School) this September. We want her to continue to the senior school as well. We currently live in Runnymede. We intend to move home so that we live close to the school. We have been seeing various places within Berkshire and Surrey for the last few weeks. However we are not familiar with these places.
Guildford was our first choice but we are unable to get any house within our budget that meets our requirements (e.g. Merrow, Burpham, Jacobs Well etc.). Therefore we have looked around Wokingham, Sandhurst, Crowthorne, Camberley, Bagshot and Windlesham. The places we really liked are Wokingham and Crowthorne. These two places seem to have the affordable good sized house with quality environment. These two places don’t seem to look too posh. We are not saying, other places are bad. It’s just the combination of affordable housing and quality of neighbourhood.

Does anyone know if GHS girls travel from Wokingham/Crowthorne areas? Its approx. 30 – 45 mins (one way) school run for us. Looking at central Guildford’s peak hour’s traffic, we may not be able to drop her off as we don’t have flexible work timings. We may need someone to drop DD to the school until she goes to senior school. Is there any school run service available in these areas, and any idea of the service charges?
For the senior school, there are direct trains from Wokingham/Crowthorne stations and take 30-40 mins. Is it easier to get train buddies?
We are also looking for alternatives. Does anyone know if there are any specific road/places within Camberley, Bagshot, Sandhurst or Windlesham (I have attached an area snapshot in this thread) that have similar environment like Wokingham/Crowthorne. Or even suggest/recommend alternate options.
I work in West London (M4, Junction 4) and intend to undertake school pick up. DH travels to various places for his work, therefore his job location changes almost every year. So he needs to be close to motorway (M3 or M4) to reach M25 (+ further reachability to M1 or M40), and our home needs to be 30-40 mins driving distance from Reading or Woking Rail Station so that he can get quick access to Central London.
We want to move somewhere for a longer term (15 years+). We have spending hours to plan this for months. The experience has been really stressful.
If anyone can provide some insight or recommendation, it will really help us to take the decision quickly (within March).
Thanks in advance for your help.

Firstly thanks to netmums for providing such an amazing platform where we can ask questions and get other mum's feedback/comments. It's very unique. Thank you.

Special thanks to GHS mums, please send pvt mssg if you think we are likeminded.

We have really (being honest here) seriously listened to all of your comments. We really appreciate everyone's time, effort and williness to help. Our plan has changed since we listened to your views. We have incoroporated your views and moved forward.

During this learning process, we realised that travelling from Wokingham/Crowthorne for our DD to GHS is difficult, even though we can afford to have a nanny, but our DD will be tired and wont be able to enjoy her school life. So we bought a house in Merrow, Guildford (We had to raise our initial budget). We learnt during this process that Merrow, Burpham, Onslow Village are very good places to live in Guildford if your DD is going to GHS as there are many girls going from these areas. Apologies for not mentioning other good places in Guildford, it's just GHS focussed.

My DD had two intial session in GHS and she loves the school. I met with other parents. They are different from LEH or NLCS, not super-rich, high-showing-posh, flying-high families. GHS parents seemed to be hardworking middleclass high quality parents. This gives me confidence that we are lucky that we did not try in NLCS and dropped LEH (or Holy Croft preps). Sorry for the parents whose DDs go to these schools, I am not here to hurt anyone or start a debate. It's just my personal view. Please ignore my comments if ur DD is going elsewhere.

Thank you everyone. This is the best feedback community we can ever had.