The cost of learning: house price premium near top state schools reaches £100,000 in some parts of the country
Families are paying more than £100,000 extra to live near the country’s best state schools according to research released today.
The average house price in areas with top-performing state schools — those with the greatest percentage of pupils achieving the best GCSE results — is now over £400,000, compared to the national average of £294,000, says Lloyds Bank.
The premium is even higher than the figures released by Santander Mortgages earlier this week, which found the additional cost of buying a property specifically within the catchment area of London’s top-performing state senior schools has risen to more than £70,000
BIG BUCKS: BEACONSFIELD
The school which was most expensive to live near compared to the rest of the county was Beaconsfield High School, a girls’ grammar school in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire.
The average house price in the school’s HP9 postcode is £1,019,000, a staggering £610,000 (149 per cent) higher than in the wider county of Buckinghamshire.
With private school fees now costing an average of £17,000 per year, a parent could spend that £610,000 on sending two children to an independent school for 18 years.
Henrietta Barnett in Hampstead Garden Suburb had the next largest gap between house prices near the school and in the borough as a whole, with homes in NW11 costing £1.1 million, compared with the borough of Barnet’s average of £672,000.
This was also the school which was least affordable to live near, with average house prices 22.2 times the average local salary of £49,600.
The most affordable high-performing school to live near was King Edward VI Handsworth School in Birmingham where the average house price of £118,000 was 3.7 times higher than the average salary of £31,700.
House prices are also rising almost twice as fast in the postal areas of the country’s top state schools than in the rest of the country.
Areas with top-performing state schools saw their house prices grow 35 per cent over the past five years, compared with the English average of 20 per cent, the report found.
This is partly because one third of the areas are in Greater London, where house prices have soared until relatively recently.
IT'S NOT ALL BAD NEWS
The figures aren’t all bad news for parents hoping to live near a top school though, with 16 of the top 30 schools recording local house prices lower than the county or borough average.
The High School for Girls in Gloucester’s GL1 postcode, where the average house price is £162,000, had the biggest percentage difference. Prices near the school were 44 per cent lower than the county average for Gloucestershire.
“While there is most definitely a premium attached to some neighbourhoods surrounding the best state schools across the country, there are also many that come in under the county average, particularly outside of London and the South East where homes remain more affordable versus average earnings,” said Lloyds Bank mortgages director Andrew Mason.