Investing in property: buying near schools Is it worth moving home to obtain a better education for your children? Many parents will have fretted about that question at some stage or another, amid rising anxiety about falling educational standards at some schools. "Yes" is the emphatic answer I have arrived at from personal experience, and which tends to be supported by a wide variety of analyses not just of exam results, but also local variations in house prices. While the academics can argue their way up and down the league tables, I am sitting on a sizeable profit from letting the location of the best school we could get our son into determine where we live. Counter-intuitive though it may seem, setting aside my chippy grammar schoolboy prejudices and paying for our son to attend public school looks like one of the best investments I ever made. Better still, I mean that not just in terms of the benefits he enjoyed, but also in the way it boosted our family balance sheet. It would be no exaggeration to say that relocating for educational reasons even helped our retirement planning. Here and now, the question above remains a real nail-biter for many parents. Moving home is already a stressful experience, and it is also an increasingly expensive one, thanks to sharp increases in stamp duty, which now adds thousands of pounds to the cost of changing your address. On the other hand, families who opt to pay twice for education - once in taxes and a second time in fees - have suffered soaring bills in the independent sector. Private school fees increased nearly twice as fast as general inflation over the past decade. Fees went up an average of 68 per cent, compared with a 37 per cent rise in the Retail Prices Index (RPI), according to Lloyds TSB Private Bank. It calculates that, since 2002, the average annual private school fee has increased from £6,820 to £11,457. Of course, one year's fees are merely a foretaste of the fiscal caning that awaits parents who opt out of state education. Allowing for inflation, it now costs an eye-watering total of more than £500,000 to send three children to private school, calculates Duncan Lawrie Private Bank. No wonder a friend of mine who educated three children privately confided: "One is a doddle, two a challenge, but three is financial suicide." He downsized and moved out of town to unlock capital gains to feed the fees monster, but now faces above-inflation rail fares to get into work. By now you may be wondering how I made a profit out of paying for our son to attend public school. Well, with apologies for the Enron-style accounting, here is the explanation. First, we only had the one child to worry about. Second, so many parents have opted out of the state system in London now that merely being willing to pauperise yourself is no guarantee of gaining a place at a good local school. So we entered our six-year-old for five independent sector schools in the hope he would gain a place at one. While waiting for the entrance exam results, I realised that 12 years" misery lay ahead not just from the expense of it all but from my wife's inevitable complaints about the dreaded school run. Here I must confess that I am one of life's confirmed pedestrians, having never taken a driving test. So, in a pathetic attempt to avoid increasingly emphatic exhortations to grow up and get a driving licence, I suggested we might move, so that our son could walk to school at whichever establishment granted him a place. Then he got into our first choice. That was how we came to buy one of the last Georgian wrecks in Highgate, paying £295,000 for four bedrooms in 1997. It is invidious to speculate about current valuations, but a next-door neighbour sold for several times that sum a few years ago before he had time to get the "For Sale" sign up. Against all that, you may very well say that it is quite wrong to compare real liabilities with paper gains, because nobody has made a penny in actual profit until they have sold. And you would be right. But such musings helped to cheer me up on the long dark nights when I fretted about how we were going to scrape together the fees. Holidays under canvas in Cornwall or Suffolk were usually part of the answer. Better still - and of wider application - there is evidence that good schools, regardless of the independent versus state class war, help local house prices to rise ahead of the national average. PrimeLocation.com estimates that prices near top-performing state primary schools are 40 per cent higher, or about £90,000 more, than identical homes fetch elsewhere. Earlier surveys by Halifax and Nationwide - respectively Britain's biggest mortgage lender and building society - have come to similar conclusions. Bearing in mind that gains on your main residence remain tax-free, the long-term return on paying more for a home near good schools can prove well worth the short-term financial pain. You might even find that you have acquired a useful nest egg to ease your path into retirement, long after the worries of educating children have become a distant memory. Tell me your views at telegraph.co.uk/cowie and be first to hear from me during the week @iancowie on Twitter