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Catchments for great schools

Good schools and high property prices go together like peaches and cream. But all that is beginning to change. Samantha Laurie explains 

In an area famed for its schools, it is no surprise that parents pay a hefty premium to live in the catchment areas of the best state providers. For in Surrey and South-West London, the problem is not finding good state schools, but qualifying to get into them. Grammar schools aside – in boroughs such as Sutton and Kingston – this means one of two things: being of the right faith or living close enough to the school to eyeball the teachers over breakfast. 

Most parents, therefore, will shrug wearily at news of a 22% hike in house prices around the nation’s most coveted schools. Yet according to the latest report from the Good Schools Guide (GSG), this halo effect is waning. Top-performing academies, it says, are now emerging in areas where prices are less inflated by middle-class buyers with big budgets.

In partnership with estate agent Savills, the Guide drew up a list of 35 of the UK’s most desired schools and matched them with postcode data on house prices. The spikes were often extreme: for Howard of Effingham School in Leatherhead, one of Surrey’s top state schools, homes in the catchment were up 99% on average prices for the county.

But the report also points to the likes of George Abbot, an outstanding academy in Guildford, where prices of homes in adjoining roads are 23% lower than the county average. True, the school is oversubscribed, but most children living within 2-4 kms are offered a place.

Admittedly, the report is not without anomalies. One school that stands out is Gordon’s, 

a state boarding school in Woking with four applications for every day pupil place. Here homes in the catchment sell within hours – usually in a bidding war – but prices still weigh in at 7% lower than the county average. Yet this result, in common with others, may be distorted by the fact that the properties concerned are so few. Catchments frequently end less than 500 metres from the school gate. 

State boarding schools like Gordon’s and Royal Alexander and Albert, in Reigate, use their extended days and curriculum packed with drama and sport to create a private school feel at state-subsidised prices. Yet few people grasp the state boarding concept, let alone how the admissions process works – for example that, in general, it is easier to find a place for a boarder than a day pupil.

It is with this kind of info that the GSG – which runs an advice service dedicated to state schools – really scores. Editor Janette Wallis says that the number of state schools in the Guide has risen from 11, when it launched, to over 300. More and more people, she insists, want a good state option as first choice.

If, that is, they can afford a home nearby. 

You can find the Good Schools Guide Savills Map here

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