The update
When we first wrote this piece, we hit a wall: the Ofsted ratings in our school dataset were completely unpopulated, so we could not separate a *good* school from any old school. We shipped the honest fallback — what proximity to *any* secondary does to prices — and promised to come back when the ratings landed.
They have landed. Our schools table now carries an Ofsted rating for 9,743 schools, and 272 of them are Outstanding-rated secondaries with map coordinates (260 mainstream secondaries, 11 all-through schools and 1 middle-deemed-secondary, spread across 110 local authorities in England). So this is the analysis we set out to write: draw a one-kilometre ring around every Outstanding secondary, and measure what homes inside the ring sell for versus everywhere else.
The answer is genuinely two-sided, and we are going to give you both halves honestly rather than cherry-pick the flattering one.
TL;DR
Nationally, the premium is huge. Homes within roughly one kilometre of an Ofsted-Outstanding secondary sold for a median of £390,000 over the last four years — against £287,000 for homes farther away. That is a +35.9% premium, on 142,862 near-school sales versus 2,614,013 farther ones.
Within a single local authority, the premium mostly disappears. Across the 143 local authorities with enough sales on both sides to compare, the *median* within-LAD premium is 0.0% — a dead heat. Exactly 71 authorities show a premium near their Outstanding secondaries; exactly 71 show a discount.
Both numbers are real. The gap between them is the whole story: Outstanding schools cluster in expensive places, but within those places they are not reliably sitting on the most expensive streets. The national premium is almost entirely a *between-area* effect — it tells you Outstanding schools are found in pricier towns and boroughs, not that the ring around the school is where the money is.
The local authorities with the biggest *within-LAD* Outstanding-catchment premium:
And the authorities where being near an Outstanding secondary is a *discount*:
How we measured it
This is England-only: Ofsted does not inspect schools in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, so an "Outstanding" rating is by definition an English signal.
Why the national premium is so big — and so misleading
A +36% national premium sounds like a slam-dunk case for paying up to live near a top school. It isn't, and the within-LAD result is the proof.
Outstanding ratings are not sprinkled evenly across the country. They concentrate in places that were already prosperous — leafy commuter towns, prosperous cities, well-resourced suburbs — because school performance correlates strongly with the affluence and stability of the families a school draws from. When you compare the *national* near-school median against the *national* everywhere-else median, you are mostly comparing Oxford and Kingston and Winchester against the whole of England, including its cheapest post-industrial towns and rural fringes. Of course the near-school number is higher. That is a fact about *which towns have Outstanding schools*, not about what the school does to its immediate surroundings.
Strip that out by comparing each Outstanding catchment only against the rest of its *own* local authority, and the premium collapses to a median of zero. Inside a single borough, an Outstanding secondary is no more likely to sit on the priciest streets than the cheapest ones.
Where the catchment premium is real
The genuine within-LAD premiums are concentrated where the Outstanding school happens to sit *in* the desirable part of town:
In every one of these, the premium is a location effect, not a proof that the school itself adds value. The school is near the money because both the school and the money are in the nice part of town.
Where being near an Outstanding secondary is *cheaper*
The 71 authorities on the other side of the ledger follow exactly the density pattern we found in the fallback version of this analysis. Secondary schools — Outstanding or not — need big sites and large catchments of children, so they often sit in the dense, lower-value urban core, while the priciest stock is in low-density villages and fringes with no school within a kilometre:
So even a top-rated school can sit at a price *discount* to its own local authority, purely because of where secondary schools physically go.
What this means if you're buying
Outcode dossiers for the areas discussed:
Caveats and limitations
Correlation, not causation — this is the big one. Outstanding schools cluster in already-affluent neighbourhoods, and high-performing schools are partly a *product* of the prosperous, stable intake those neighbourhoods provide. The premium we measure reflects the surrounding area at least as much as the school. Living near an Outstanding secondary does not *make* a home worth more; the two tend to be found in the same places.
Ofsted's grade is a snapshot, and the framework changed. From September 2024, Ofsted stopped awarding a single overall grade to newly-inspected schools, moving to a report-card model. Every "Outstanding" in our dataset therefore comes from a graded inspection *before* that change — in fact all 272 were last inspected between October 2019 and July 2024. Some of those judgements are several years old and may not reflect a school's current performance. Treat "Outstanding" as "Outstanding at its last graded inspection," not a live guarantee.
Proximity is approximated. The one-kilometre ring is a straight-line geography buffer around a postcode centroid, not walking distance to an address or an actual catchment boundary. Real catchment areas are set by each school and bear no fixed relationship to distance.
Mix-shift. The near and far buckets differ in property-type mix — denser near-school areas hold more flats and terraces, farther areas more detached houses. Part of every gap, in both directions, is composition rather than location per se.
England-only. Ofsted inspects English schools only; Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland use separate inspectorates and are excluded entirely.