Do good schools really push up property prices? Disentangling school and neighbourhood effects with empirical evidence from Brighton, England

The influence of school quality on local house prices is a recurrent theme in narratives around housing affordability. A perception that proximity to good schools pushes prices up was one factor which contributed to a shift in the secondary-school admissions policy away from proximity-based criteria in Brighton, England, in 2008. But is this link as strong as many believe? In this paper we conduct a detailed spatio-temporal analysis of 81,000 residential transactions in Brighton between 2000 and 2019, demonstrating that good school proximity is less important than other contextual factors.