Louche

I'm new here, so please let me know if I'm in the wrong place!

We are an Australian family with a relocation job opportunity in Milton Keynes. I am looking for some recommendations for pleasant areas with good schools, as my children are aged 3 and 5. Any tips appreciated

MissSP

Hi,

I currently live in Italy but we are also relocating back to the UK and I live just outside Milton Keynes. Do you want to be central or live in a town outside and commute. Road links are good so maximum journey time from surrounding area is between 15-30 mins. If you want to PM me with a few more details then I'd be happy to advise a bit more. There are some lovely villages outside Milton Keynes but the town itself is quite sterile. I've got a 2.5 year old and he'll be going to pre-school in Olney when we move back. To check on quality of schools you can check Ofsted's website. I'm not sure if you have a similar system in Oz but they carry out inspections of schools and post their findings with recommendations.

Anyway, let me know what more you need and I'd be happy to help.

Sarah

Louche

Thanks, I will PM you

quoll

LOL you are going to get comments about MK being like Canberra! (and it is to some extent, that it is a planned town and somewhat on the sterile side). If you dont want a suburban type environment then there are plenty of villages around which would give you a different perspective. Ofsted reports are the best for working out which schools you might be interested in but nothing really beats the eyeball test and http://www.rightmove.co.uk/ a good place to start to check out rentals

Louche

Ha, I have heard the Canberra comments. One thing I am worried about is school zoning. IN Australia your local state school has to take you if you are in the catchment area, but it seems in the UK there are only a set amount of places and you can be assigned elsewhere. Any comments on that?

MissSP

That is absolutely true. If your local school is full you'll be assigned to the nearest one with places. There's big competition for places to get into the schools with the best Ofsted ratings for obvious reasons. The downside of living in central MK is that good schools have fewer places - the next school may have a very bad Ofsted rating but that could be your only option. Also, MK is made up of districts and even on the same housing estate they have a system of shared ownership for poorer/rougher families. This was why I never wanted to live there. I know you said your husband doesn't want a big commute to work and 30 mins in the UK is nothing. I'd guess most people do 30-60 minutes per day each way. If your husband could manage 30 mins drive time to work you'd be much better off for the kids. The village schools often operate a different system so you're less likely to be assigned somewhere else.

Louche

In Sydney I commute over an hour each way (45 mins for my husband) but we are hoping for an improvement in our work life balance.. I guess everyone is in the same situation. But 30 minutes is doable.

Ballys

"From a hilltop I spied a sprawl of blue roofs about three-quarters of a mile off and thought that might be the shopping mall and headed off for it. The pedestrian walkways, which had seemed rather agreeable to me at first, began to become irritating. They wandered lazily through submerged cuttings, nicely landscaped but with a feeling of being in no hurry to get you anywhere. Clearly they had been laid out by people who had thought of it as a two-dimensional exercise. They followed circuitous, seemingly purposeless routes that must have looked pleasing on paper, but gave no consideration to the idea that people, faced with a long walk between houses and shops, would mostly like to get there in a reasonably direct way. Worse still was the sense of being lost in a semi-subterranean world cut off from visible landmarks. I found myself frequently scrambling up banks just to see where I was, only to discover that it was nowhere near where I wanted to be.”

http://readfreeonline.net/OnlineBook...Island_15.html