North East Parents Pay More For Homes Near Good Schools

10 September 2014, 06:00 | Updated: 10 September 2014, 07:48

One in ten North East parents would spend an extra £20,000 on a house near to a good school

New research by Confused.com has also revealed one in ten (10%) parents had given a false address to enable their child to go to a better local school.

Nearly a third (29%) of parents in our region had even moved house to be in area of a catchment area of a good school.

It seems choosing a school for a child is high on North East parents' list of priorities - with nearly one in five (18%) admitting that they started thinking about what school to send their child to before they were even born.

As a result of this, parents are actually paying a 'catchment area premiums', with house prices around the most academically successful state schools in the country becoming so high that it may well work out cheaper for parents to send their children to a local private school.

In recent weeks, figures from the Department of Education revealed that six primary schools have classes with just one teacher to 70 children, while nearly 100 have classes with at least 50 pupils.

Analysis suggests that at the current rate, the number of pupils in large classes will reach almost half a million by 2020.