Good Primary School Means Steep Housing Premium in the UK

Parents who wish to live in the neighborhood with a good primary school in England pay a “premium” of up to 42% of the purchase price of the house.

According to analysis of the data collected by the property website PrimeLocation.com, parents who want to live in the cachement area of a good primary schools are forced to pay up to a 42% premium on the purchase price of their house, compared to the neighborhoods containing second-tier schools.

Houses in the catchment area of one Lancashire school sell for an average of £572,500 – around two-and-a-half times the cost of homes in the rest of the region.

The competition for primary schools slots in England is fierce, with up to nine students competing for the same spot. The government has long projected the coming shortage of primary school places but not much has been done to ameliorate the problem. As a result, parents are forced to jump through more and more expensive hoops in order to secure a space for their children. The corresponding increase in property pricing means that middle-class families who have lived in the area for decades are now being forced out.

Nigel Lewis, the website’s property analyst, said: “It’s no surprise that parents are investing considerable amounts of money choosing a home that gives their child access to the best school possible.

“This demand has led to higher than average asking prices for homes in the most sought- after neighborhoods, pricing many parents out of the area altogether.

The analysts collected data on the asking price in the area surrounding top 100 primary schools in England and found the average asking price for a home to be £309,732. That is nearly £92,000 higher than the average asking price for a house over the whole of England. Surprisingly, the school “premiums,” as the researches called them, were lowest in London, where the property prices are already high compared to the rest of the country.

Top primaries in the East Midland yielded the biggest house price rises, it emerged, with property around £82,000 – 48 per cent – higher than the regional average.

Homes near the neighbouring Curbar and Grindleford primary schools in Hope Valley, Derbyshire, commanded average prices of £442,692, said the study. This was £271,557 – or 159 per cent – higher than the East Midlands average.

Comments

Sean the Welshman

March 27, 2012 at 1:25 pm

This has been coming for a while. Parents start worrying about getting their kids into a primary before they’re even parents. I don’t know why the government won’t just invest in more schools, but for some reason they just won’t.

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wintertime

March 30, 2012 at 2:09 pm

Where is the evidence that these schools are in any manner exceptional? It could be that the school may be simply be very ordinary but it is the parents, and the child himself, who are doing an excellent job of **afterschooiing** IN THE HOME.

Unless the contributions of the “In the Home” efforts are measured it is impossible to know if any school is “good” or not. To my knowledge “afterschooling” has never been seriously studied by those in the field of education.

I will go even further.

We spend up to a quarter of million dollars in some states and cities in the United States to place children in government K-12 education and we do NOT NOT NOT know if government schooling teaches the child anything. We do not know because afterschooling has never been seriously studied. It could be that government schools merely send home a curriculum and textbook for the parent and child to follow IN THE HOME. It could be that government schools are merely very, very,very expensive testing centers and a source for grading projects, and the really hard work of teaching and learning is happening IN THE HOME!

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- Linda Brees
  
  March 31, 2012 at 12:20 pm
  
  I would imagine, since we’re talking about the UK, they judge the quality of the schools by the league tables like they’ve always done.
  
  Reply
mcp_43

April 1, 2012 at 7:58 am

Could it be that parents that highly value education are grouping together in the same catchment area? This increased demand for housing in those areas causes the price of housing there to rise.

Reply