A perception that proximity to good schools pushes house prices up is common and one factor that 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 often playing an often more important role. The admissions policy reform has little discernible impact on prices.