About this Talk

A perception that proximity to good schools pushes house prices up is common and one factor which contributed to a shift in the secondary-school admissions policy away from proximity-based criteria in Brighton, England, in 2008. This decoupling of proximity was expected to reduce perceived house price inflation near good schools. But is this link as strong as many believe or are other factors more important? We examine 81,000 residential transactions in Brighton between 2000 and 2019, assessing the effect of schools alongside other contextual factors such as building attributes, accessibility to jobs, deprivation, and macro price trends, as well as the impact of the policy change in 2008. We find that after accounting for local neighbourhood confounders and a general upward drift in property prices, proximity to good schools has only a limited impact on house prices, with other local factors playing an often more important role. The admissions policy reform has had little discernible impact on prices.

About the Speaker

Adam Dennett is Professor of Urban Analytics in the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. where he has been based since 2010, first as a post-doc and then as a Lecturer and Senior Lecturer / Associate Professor, becoming Professor in 2021. From 2018 and 2023 he was Head of Department and is an Elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences as well as a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. His academic interests are publishing on topics such as migration and residential mobility, housing, gentrification, geographies of beer and brewing, synthetic data and longitudinal analysis, as well as dabbling more recently in areas such as Health and Transport. Tying all of these potentially disparate themes together is a focus on using data and quantitative methods - especially if he can use R - and a passion for applied work with real world outcomes, which often finds a home in urban settings.

Disentangling School and Neighbourhood Effects with Evidence from Brighton