Try out our new School Checker

You don’t move house many times in your life, so when you do, it needs to be a move that matters! One of these moves can be the one most important for your children – homes with proximity to a good school.

Here at Rightmove, we know how important this is, so we introduced our School Checker in 2015 which appears on every home listing on our site to tell you all the important schools info before you commit to your dream home.

Recently, we have partnered with FindASchool by 192.com to made some changes to the tool, so read on and find out why School Checker is going to be invaluable in your home search.

Click the ‘School Checker’ tab on a listing to see a list of the closest schools. You can change the view to see primary and secondary separately. There will be information on the school’s proximity to the home, what type of school it is and the Ofsted rating. There is also a map which shows where the schools sit in comparison to the home.

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The biggest change in the latest version of School Checker is that we can now tell you whether a state school was under or oversubscribed in the latest intake year. This provides the clearest indicator for the demand for places in a specific school.

The map, which used to show a colour-coded heat map, now shows a successful admissions area for over subscribed schools. This map shows exactly where you would have lived in previous years to secure a place at the school. On listings where it doesn’t show a successful admissions area, it means the school was undersubscribed. This means everybody who applied on time was offered a place, irrespective of where they lived. Only if a school was oversubscribed do we now display a shape on the map, because it is only in these instances that geography is important.

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We also know more about the admission policies for each individual school and indicate clearly if faith is part of the admission criteria, and if it is, it wouldn’t be appropriate to show a geographical shape, as other factors will take precedent. You can also click through from here to find out more information, including exam results and Ofsted results.

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This information is important to many types of home buyer, whether you’re buying with kids in mind, if you’re considering doing Buy To Let or just to know and advertise your home as being in a catchment area if you’re selling.

It’s an easy-to-use tool that gives you a lot of vital information, so why not try out our School Checker now!


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