Buying near a good school comes at a price - Telegraph

Buying near a good school comes at a price - Telegraph

We live at a time when, for many of the squeezed middle classes, the quality of available schooling matters more than the houses they live in. Nowhere is this felt more than in Oxford, to where disillusioned Londoners move in droves.

“We put Cosmo down at birth for the Dragon School and thought that four years would give us time to move,” says successful novelist Lily Prior. “We thought that once we sold our house between Clapham and Wandsworth Commons we would get a big beautiful house with a large garden in Oxford.”

How wrong they were. They found prices high and hardly anything for sale. “By the time Cosmo started school we were still in the Randolph Hotel and had nowhere to live. But we were determined to live in the city, to walk and cycle, and in the end we bought a much smaller house than we had in London. Half our lives are in storage now.”