So you’re moving house to be near a good school, are you? Clever. Best crack out the spreadsheet and start banging in Ofsted data.
Or, actually, don’t. You see, all the really clever parents have outsourced the data entry. They’ve turned the country into a blinking mass of targets (schools) and they’ve locked on with their homing missile (child).
In other words, they’re using online tools.
I tried three of them to see if they’re worth it (spoiler: they are). But which is most worth it of all?
The Best School Finder Guides
I tested three tools in June 2024:
They’re a roughly similar size, all attracting around 100k-300k visitors a month. Locrating is the largest, followed by GSG, then School Guide. Here’s the data over a 3 month period.
They all cost between £10-£20 for a month and I have to say all three of them were worth it. Broadly, the functionality comprises: 1) maps and data about schools, 2) reviews. But they all do slightly different things.
Locrating
- Pros: comprehensive, useful catchment areas, honest
- Cons: doesn’t work well on mobile, no personal reviews
I was immediately impressed by Locrating. I liked it. I ended up actually using it for our own property search.
Basically it’s a big map. It colours outstanding schools in green, and needs improvement in red. Immediately, it’s very easy to see which parts of town have the best options.
But it’s so much more than that. It shows every school in the country, and all the data you might need – ofsted, exam results, % of 1st language English, everything.
It shows a heat map for the ‘catchment area’. I’ve put catchment area in inverted commas, because obviously it’s not as simple as that. But even so, the heatmap gives you a likely area of admission success, which is actually more useful than catchment area in many ways.
Even more useful is the ‘place my house’ function. I used it like this:
- Find a house I liked on Rightmove
- Place the house in that village on locrating
- Locrating then tells you where most kids in that location go to school
- Go on Rightmove again, repeat. Resist the urge to search £20 million houses.
This is really what we’re looking for with these tools, and Locrating delivers.
Main downside is it doesn’t work great on mobile. Also it’s not free. But free online tools are overrated, and usually rubbish. Besides it’s only £13.99 for a month, and a child’s future is usually worth more than that isnt it?
School Guide
- Pros: Easy to use, comparison tool
- Cons: Map functionality and reviews are limited, most expensive
School Guide is very similar to Locrating, and it’s very nearly as good.
You search by school or area, and are presented with a map. You unlock it by paying a fee, then you get a sprinkling of schools around your chosen area.
You can click on them, see the catchment areas.
If you scroll down, you can also see a bunch of data about the school.
So it is a map. But it’s quite a simple map. Maybe you like simple maps.
Personally I preferred the functionality of Locrating, and the at-a-glance view of which school were outstanding, and which weren’t. School Guide also didn’t give the detailed breakdown of where most children attended by precise location.
Better is the comparison functionality. You can select a few schools, then see them side by side. It’s simple but effective.
School Guide also offer reviews written by parents. In principle it’s a good idea. Unfortunately they are so many schools that in a spotcheck of 5 schools around me I only found 3 reviews in total. And two of them were from very pissed off and disgruntled parents. Hmm.
Overall, School Guide is a great tool, and only £19.95 for a month. You might gel with it more than me. What I would say is that if you want written reviews it’s not ideal, and you really want to be looking at the next option…
Good Schools Guide
- Pros: detailed reviews, well-written
- Cons: poor coverage of state schools, limited data
The Good Schools Guide is an institution. It’s over 30 years old. You can even get it in paper form. You know, paper. It’s like a soft phone made of trees.
And you can see how it’s lasted. It’s still good, and quite useful. Essentially the Good Schools Guide is a directory of all schools in the UK. It shows some basic info like Ofsted and exam results. But the real value is in the reviews.
The GSG actually go into schools and review them. They talk to teachers, parents, and pupils. And they write detailed, colourful reviews of the schools that give you a real flavour of them (you can read a sample review for free here).
It’s fantastically written, and if you can find a review of your child’s prospective school, you should definitely read it.
Unfortunately, that’s where the problem lies. The GSG does not review all schools. Not nearly. In fact, out of 218 near to me, only 35 of them had reviews, and 20 of those were independent schools.
The GSG, then, doesn’t really solve our main problem: where should I move to be near the best school? It’s more of a research tool for deciding between very nice and/or very expensive establishments.
Luckily it does that very well. And it only costs £17.99 for a month. If you are weighing up £1000s a year in private school fees, it’s a no-brainer.
