St Albans Primary Schools - Confused

[Shamoo]

Hi all - looking for advice from anyone in St Albans or the surrounding areas. We currently live in St A but looking to move as we need a bigger place, and with our daughter now 1 we want to make sure we move to a house in the catchment area for a strong primary school. Given St A’s reputation for great schools, I thought this would be relatively straight forward.

Now I have done some research, a lot of the schools seem to be not nearly as good as I had expected. For example Oakwood is outstanding and I had been super keen, and the agents push houses round there hard (975k for an unmodernised 3 bed) but the results from 2017-19 are below average for reading, writing and maths. And % of students achieving at a higher standard is pretty unimpressive.

Same with fleetville, which is also meant to be outstanding, but is well below average for writing, below average for maths and average for reading. But agents still push it as a great school based on a 10 year old ofsted rating.

Other than Skyswood (whose catchment is tiny) I can’t really see any school that would justify spending £1m on a totally average house to get near. Maybe Maple or Bernard’s Heath.

Am I missing something?? Do I need to move to harpenden? I love love St A but can’t justify so much for a house with a school below average ☹️

I used to live locally and would say Harpenden is better for school (& all round but that's just my view!) A lost of people from St Albans travelled into Harpenden. If you stayed in St Albans, you might be able to travel the 10/15 minutes depending on the school acceptance on a place.

I agree. Harpenden is amazing for schools, better than St A.

Thanks both, that’s helpful to have the confirmation. I will refocus on harpenden.

I called one place that went on the market in Harpenden yesterday and they already had 26 viewings by this morning, so I need to up my game! 😂