ofsted rating used to increse property value

[lovinguissoeasybecozurrich]

hi all, I'm just asking for opinions and experiences about this.

I'm looking at some houses that I like and they're quite over-priced as it is and when discussing this with the EA, they've given me a whole spiel about the primary schools (two of them) that close by. The EA was really harping about their OFSTED rating of "outstanding".

So I checked with OFSTED and the last inspection was in 2008 for one school and 2010 for the other!! Obviously yonks ago. And then on the website it also says one of the schools "closed" and turned into an Academy in 2012 with no further OFSTED inspections done. That's 11 years without any inspections.

Firstly, I don't really trust OFSTED with all the negative news about that this year. Secondly, is it just me or do these EAs and sellers think buyers are thick or something?? As though we can't check these numbers and "ratings" from a whole era ago??

Please note I don't have children. Just planning ahead.

Can some buyers or anyone with the experiences above tell me what they think of this and maybe what I should say to the EA because I will not be making an offer at asking price (ha!) it will be a fair and square offer also considering the school "catchment" and lack of uptodate OFSTED ratings because 2012 ratings are obviously null and void.

Also what is an Academy School exactly??

Thank you MN!!

I do agree that an Ofsted judgement is not everything but that's all parents have to go on

This.

I had no concept of how small catchment areas can be.

Our house is gorgeous and on a great road. However it's for some reason lumped into the scuzzy school catchment. I assumed we would be fine to get into the amazing primary which is 250m from our house across a main road.
We aren't.
The catchment cut off is at the main road and hadn't nudged in 5 years last year furthest child to get a place was 120m from the school 😑
Parents literally buy to get their first kid in then sell and move (sibling rule) The school is monopolised by a few streets of tiny terraces on narrow roads and a scrum for parking.

Always check what the potential primaries are.

Regarding cars and dropped kerbs. Even if the drive space is exactly the same width as those on the road who already have them, don’t assume you will be given permission, because councils can change the goal posts on width requirements and simply refuse you.

Make sure you check current criteria before putting an offer in. Maybe ask them if they have applied to have the kerb dropped and have been refused. But don’t take their word for it. Make sure you check if parking is important to you.

thanks for responding.

i just find it bizarre to trust a rating/report from over a decade ago just because that's the norm around the country. i think it sounds abnormal.

but i do understand that's all parents have to go on atm

i think because i dont trust ofsted and my inner belief that all schools should be good anyway (why aren't we questioning why they aren't??!) i haven't really looked at the school ratings when looking at an area.

i've been looking for crime rates though and the safety factor because that's most important to me above all. and then the house itself.

i'd understand if the EA boasted about how safe the area is with an uptodate crime report lol, but an ofsted rating from 11 years ago?! naaah

i want my kids to be able to walk to school and back when they're old enough and feel like they are in a safe community. i don't think "outstanding" schools guarantee that. they just tell a parent, "oh look your kid is more likely to get As here" which isn't the most important thing for an education to me. and i was a straight A student.

anyways, appreciate everyone's responses. i'll ask some of my friends too what they think. i'm sure i have a teacher or two in my wider network too who can tell me what they think from a teacher's professional perspective too.

good night

Your attitude is so odd OP 😅

oh excellent, thanks for this. i've been researching this during my lunch break and was going to call the local council for more. your advise is much appreciated! if you saw the kerb honestly, it looks so weird. and most of the cars have their rear overlapping over the pedestrian walk (which isn't that wide). saw a few mums and dads get on the road because they couldn't walk along the pedestrian path but they acted like it was normal. it's not a very busy street but does come off a main road on one end. so much for outstanding schools in the area if parents can't walk their babies on the pedestrian paths hey!

You can’t know for sure that a good rating will mean a good school. You definitely can’t know for sure that a good school will be a good match for your child.

what you can know with certainty is that school reputations are self-reinforcing. A school with a good rating and/or a good reputation attracts parents to the catchment who value education. That in turn provides a population of students who are easier to teach. Those students aren’t smarter, they just have fewer life distractions and tend to have parents who have the time and resources to support their child’s education.

what's a scuzzy school catchment?
i'm more angry that areas like this exist and we normalise it and think it's okay any kid should be able to go to a poorly performing school.
all kids deserve a good education.

One with a shit Ofsted rating!

It sounds like you’ve an axe to grind about the inequality that is wealthier people being able to buy their way into ‘good’ state schools via house purchases. Yes it’s perhaps not fair and yes in ideal world all schools would be equally good but sadly that’s just not the way things are . All you can do is offer what you think it’s worth to you and hope you get lucky.

to a previous PP saying schools in catchment are going for £500k more than those not. Gosh - my DPIL's house was bang slap in the middle of a very very well regarded 2ndary school & that is why the people bought it. DPIL's house wasn't worth £500k in the first place. I think they may have got a bit more for it but I think it just made it made it more saleable

@OP If you don't think the house is worth it - don't offer the price. Pointless arguing with the EA about Ofsted inspections. They can only report what they have. Offer what you think it is worth and walk away if the vendors turn it down. As so often said - a house is worth what someone will pay for it. You may think the price is inflated unduly - but in the end it is the vendor's decision & this will be influenced by what other people offer. If there are other reasons you don't like the house then I would keep the search going.

But good luck - house hunting is hard

I’m a ‘professional’ if you like. Yes some ofsted reports are wildly out of date but the correlation between ‘nice, safe areas’ which you have as a criteria and outstanding schools is high. Higher priced housing area also correlates strongly with higher pupil results, lower suspensions & exclusions and high staff retention so it becomes self perpetuating and so the outstanding school is still more likely than not to be very good.

If you think ofsted grades have a huge impact on house prices in catchment areas now just wait till Labour add 20% to school fees and price out the lower end of the private school market back into state.

It's not what the EA is dictating it's market forces, your fight isn't with the EA , he just wants the top price. Your fight is convincing other buyers and the vendor that the ofsted isn't relevant and shouldn't dictate the price, good luck with that. The house is worth what you/ others are prepared to pay and that could be for your reason or for THEIR reason. And if their reason is paying more for an old OFSTED rating then it's as valid as your reason for wanting to pay less for an old ofsted rating. !!!

The house is only worth what someone is willing to pay. Make an offer that you are willing to pay. If it's worth more to someone else (possibly someone thicker than you who doesn't realise the ofsted rating is a decade old) then that is their problem. If no one else makes an offer the vendors can choose what to do with yours. You aren't being unreasonable to make whatever offer you see fit. They can take it or leave it.

You can have a whole other thread about whether an OFSTED report giving one grading or another is a good indicator as to what the school is going to be like or not, but as everyone has tried to explain to you, it will be a selling point for many.

However, as has been said several times - a house is "worth" what people are prepared to pay for it.
You seem very confident there haven't been other viewings and you seem to think that being on the market 2 months is a long time. It seems there are things about the house you aren't keen on, but clearly something is also attracting you to the house.
Another person looking might be really drawn to the school's reputation but put off by the fact it has a big garden. We are all looking for different things.
What you need to decide is what is the most you would be prepared to pay to live there. Then the person selling has to decide whether they want to take that offer or not. That's all. You need to calm down your anger about the mention of an OFSTED report. It isn't relevant to you, so make your decision about putting an offer in, or not, based on what you think is important to you.

You’re getting so worked up about something you can’t change @lovinguissoeasybecozurrich

Houses in catchment for good schools always do attract a premium price, there are enough parents who do care about Ofsted ratings - even out of date ones - to ensure this. Just accept it as fact. Your choices are to not offer on the house because you don’t want to pay the premium on something you won’t use. Or pay it because you happen to like the house enough and look forward to selling it for a better price than houses out of catchment in a few years time.

Unless the school gets a disastrous Ofsted inspection in between buying & selling of course, that’s a risk if you’re purely looking at resale value.

Ofsted has a policy (a bad one IMO) of leaving inspections of excellent schools with a longer gap. This coupled with the disruption caused by covid has led to a decade old rating being quite normal.

A school near reading dropped from excellent to requires improvement a few
months ago, I think the main reason was technical paperwork on safeguarding which is an automatic black mark. The head killed herself on getting the report. It was tragic.

But what else can the EA say? That is the current rating. They can’t say it’s something else.

As @Noname99 says, the premium will only increase if 20% VAT is added to school fees. No question.

@lovinguissoeasybecozurrich no I wouldn’t pay a premium for a house that has an Ofsted outstanding rating, because I was a teacher and assistant head for many years and know what that means and I don’t have children of school age, so I’ve no skin in the game.

What I said was, that people do take notice of it, however misguided they may be and it does bump up house prices and if you want the house you pay the premium. Or not.

Estate agents market properties, saying they’re in ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ catchments.

However unfair you think it is, you can’t change the perception, so there’s no point getting riled about it.

The best school I worked in, the most caring, nurturing and supportive environment for children and staff, was RI.

If people buy into this, it will sell for that price. Your opinion is worthless at that point.

Only you can decide if you like the house enough to buy it at the inflated value a decent school catchment is giving it. Just know that if those schools plunge into Requires Improvement and stay there, then when you go to sell your asset might have depreciated off the back of it.

Tricky. Our school was rated outstanding in 2006 and then on further inspection in 2021 tanked to ‘serious weaknesses’ - it’s made its way back to ‘good’ in the interim but it’s not the school it was.

hasn’t affected house prices tho - it’s still a very desirable school in an affluent part of town. And the difficulty is that I think you’re right about the grading and your low confidence in it - the ofsted rating is not desirable to you, but it might be to other players in the market. And it might be if you sell on.

For you the school catchment isn't important, it wouldn't be for me either because my children are in secondary school so not applying elsewhere. For you parking is important, it would be for me. For other people with younger children catchment is important, when my children were younger catchment was important too. The estate agent doesn't know whether catchment will be relevant to you so he tells you anyway.

Even though being close to a good school isn't important to me I know that it will increase the house prices for those who are concerned. Many people will move within their local area and they will know the reputations of the schools and move accordingly.

A school which hasn't been checked recently may or may not still be good, however it would have been checked if it had been reported for safeguarding concerns. If you plan to have children in the future, even if you plan to move before they start school, at least consider the school because it takes a lot more effort to move once they are in school.

Also some parents get a bit nutty about living in school catchment when they have need of a school place and will pay whatever they can to secure a school place based on their perception.

And that need of a school place does come round quickly, I’ve known many people buy before kids with no thought about schools only to start panicking when they have kids and realise their school choices are not ideal.

@lovinguissoeasybecozurrich I think this house isn’t for you.

Househunting is hard, but it isn’t THIS hard, and if you’re getting worked up over OFSTED, inequality, and pavement parking at this stage, I’d say let it go. There are other houses with big gardens.

FWIW an outstanding OFSTED rating is not just about grades — or about them at all. Schools publish their GCSE results anyway. It’s more about leadership, safeguarding, perceived quality of teaching etc. And schools can perform well on one measure and less well on another. People value different things, and parents seldom choose a school based on an overall OFSTED rating alone. But it’s a good shortcut to deciding which schools to look at, as it’s a good shortcut to understanding why houses in the catchment area may be priced higher than others.

@lovinguissoeasybecozurrich "scuzzy school catchment" is the catchment area for the scuzzy primary school at the bottom of the hill.
And yes! @Doyoumind It DOES have a crap offsted rating --and feeds to poorly performing secondaries --

I don't really get what you want from this thread.
Addressing education inequality? Advice on dropped kerbs? To rail against the injustices of a capitalist society?

It is crap? Yes.
Is it just life and do we have to make compromises? Also yes.

You can't magically change perceptions around catchments lifting house value.

Just cut to the chase.
Put in whatever offer you think the house is worth and don't budge when they decline it.
Then find "properly priced" house with a big garden and off-road parking in a primary school black hole or next to a poorly performing primary and live happily ever after...