Crib sheet on right suburb for best school
Parents helped to find homes giving access to top state schools
● Want your child to get a top-notch state education? Then buy a home in Johannesburg’s Upper Houghton or Kensington. If you’re in Cape Town, Rondebosch, Newlands or Claremont should do it. In Durban, choose Berea West or Grayleigh.
New research by a property group identifies suburbs that are feeder zones for the top 66 state schools.
Some schools give preference to pupils from local communities, while others accept them from further afield.
The company, Property Fox, said it was confronted daily with questions such as: “If I buy in Kensington [Johannesburg], will my kids get into Jeppe?” or “Will owning a house in Mowbray [Cape Town] get Tanya into Rustenburg?”
It commissioned independent education researcher Kerry Petrie to conduct research on feeder zones to assist property buyers in their decision-making. She selected schools in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban, Bloemfontein, East London and Pretoria based on their consistent 100% matric pass rate from 2013 to 2017.
Crispin Inglis, co-founder and CEO of Property Fox, said: “It is hard for parents to get to grips with exactly where to buy property so that they have the best chance of being accepted into a specific school. And it is a Catch-22 because until you have an address and apply, you won’t know if you will get in.”
Kevin Jacobs, owner of RE/MAX Premier, and who specialises in selling property in Cape Town’s southern suburbs, said property in Rondebosch and Wynberg sold very quickly. “If they are priced correctly in those areas, we generally sell them within the first week or a maximum of three weeks.”
Lindsay Beck, Pam Golding’s area manager for Cape Town’s southern suburbs, said it was a fact that people wanted to buy close to schools.
“Even young couples who don’t have children are thinking ahead and saying, ‘We may have children in the next year or two and we need to make sure we buy near a school so that when they’re of schoolgoing age we fall into the feeder zone area’.”
A young couple, who did not want to be named, said they had sold their three-bedroom house in Rondebosch and bought a
It’s taking away that family bond that he and I could have Puleng Khasu
Mom
two-bedroom flat about 1.5km away to get closer to the Little Bosch Grade R and Activity Centre, a pre-primary school that is the feeder school for Rondebosch Boys’ Preparatory School.
Just after midnight on January 1 this year, the couple e-mailed their application for a place in Grade R for their son, who is four years old, because they wanted to be first in the queue.
“I didn’t have to move but my son’s place is not guaranteed unless I am in the catchment zone,” the husband told the Sunday Times.
Another parent, Puleng Khasu, is hoping it will be a case of “third time lucky” when she applies for places for her 12-year-old son at the Grove Primary School and Wynberg Boys’ High in Cape Town.
Despite being placed on the waiting list at both schools twice previously, she was unsuccessful in securing a place for him and
had to send him to a school in Vryburg, in North West, where her elderly parents live.
“It’s upsetting. It’s taking away that family bond that he and I could have,” she told the Sunday Times.
Top government schools have been inundated with applications for places in Grade 8 next year.
They said they were popular because of their excellent facilities and their proud academic and sporting history.