School Zones in Tea Tree Gully

Almost every week someone tells me they're buying in a suburb "for the school". Then it turns out the suburb sits across two different zones, and the side of the road matters more than the suburb name does.

Zoned, unzoned, and why the difference matters

South Australia runs two different systems at once, and most buyers don't know there's a difference until it affects them.

A zone is a drawn boundary. The Department for Education publishes the map, and if your address falls inside it you get priority enrolment at that school. A catchment area is what applies to a school with no drawn zone — the department defines it as the area "surrounding an unzoned school that is closest by road… than any other unzoned school". Either way, in the department's words, "all schools are required to give priority enrolment to children who live inside their zone or catchment area."

The practical difference: a zone has a hard edge you can look up on a map. A catchment is worked out by road distance, so it moves depending on what's around it.

Most primary schools around here are not zoned at all

This surprises people. As at the 2026 enrolment year, these local primary schools have no drawn zone — placement is by catchment, the closest unzoned school by road:

• Redwood Park Primary School
• Ridgehaven Primary School
• Surrey Downs Primary School
• Modbury School P-6, and Modbury West School (two different schools)
• Modbury South Primary School
• Banksia Park School R-6
• Highbury Primary School
• Dernancourt School

The local primary schools that do have a drawn zone are Ardtornish Primary, Golden Grove Primary, Greenwith Primary, Tea Tree Gully Primary, Wynn Vale School and Keithcot Farm Primary.

Two local naming quirks worth knowing, because they trip people up on a map: Highbury Primary School is physically in Hope Valley, not Highbury, and so is Modbury South Primary. And there is no "Hope Valley Primary School" — the government primary schools in that suburb are Modbury South and Highbury.

There's a wrinkle on the schools that run all the way through. The Heights School (Preschool to Year 12), Avenues College and Charles Campbell College each have a secondary zone but no primary zone. So the same school can be zoned for your Year 8 and catchment-based for your Year 3.

This one matters commercially and I've heard it stated wrongly more than once: "you're in The Heights zone" is not true for a primary-aged child. There is no primary zone to be in. The school says so itself.

Several suburbs sit across two high school zones

This is the one that catches people out. These suburbs are not wholly inside a single high school zone — the boundary runs through them, so two houses in the same suburb can be zoned to different schools:

Worth being straight with you about where this comes from. Nobody — not the department, not any portal — publishes a list of which suburbs sit in which zone. Zones exist as boundaries on a map, not as suburb names. What's below is my own reading of the department's published boundaries against the state's suburb boundaries. It's reliable enough to tell you which suburbs you need to be careful in. It is not a substitute for checking your actual address, and I wouldn't want you relying on it as one.

The suburbs that are straightforward: Hope Valley and Highbury both sit with Modbury High School, Banksia Park with Banksia Park International, Vista almost entirely with Banksia Park International, and Dernancourt with Avenues College.

No local school is capacity managed

When a school gets badly oversubscribed the Minister can put a capacity management plan on it, which tightens enrolment even for in-zone families. As published at 1 October 2026 there are exactly eleven such schools in the whole state, and not one of them is in the City of Tea Tree Gully.

The nearest is Morialta Secondary College, whose zone covers none of the suburbs above. So if you're buying here, in-zone should mean in-zone.

The boundaries have also been stable. Comparing the department's own published zone files for the 2024 and 2025 enrolment years, no high school zone boundary changed — not one school added, removed or redrawn. That's worth knowing if you're buying for a child who won't start high school for a few years. It's not a guarantee, and the department's own finder warns that zones are reviewed and can change, but the recent record is steady.

One+ and the Golden Grove campus

Golden Grove High School shares a campus with Gleeson College and Pedare Christian College. The official name for that arrangement is One+, the Golden Grove Secondary Schools' Campus.

Worth being clear about, because I've heard it misunderstood at inspections: Gleeson and Pedare are non-government schools. Gleeson is Catholic, Pedare is Uniting. Sharing the campus gives you no zone entitlement to either of them — they run their own enrolment, and living nearby doesn't secure a place.

What the houses cost, zone by zone

Median house price by suburb, June quarter 2026, from the Office of the Valuer-General's own published sales data:

Suburb	Median	Sales	Year on year
Modbury Heights	$939,000	23	+11.1%
Golden Grove	$933,500	28	+7.9%
Hope Valley	$928,750	22	+7.9%
St Agnes	$905,000	17	+11.7%
Redwood Park	$900,000	16	+19.1%
Ridgehaven	$895,000	22	+15.5%
Modbury	$880,000	21	+13.6%
Surrey Downs	$850,000	12	+12.9%
Metro Adelaide	$975,000	—	—

Source: Office of the Valuer-General SA, median house sales, June quarter 2026. Year-on-year compares the June quarter 2026 against the June quarter 2025.

Read those carefully rather than as a league table. Each one rests on twelve to twenty-eight sales in a single quarter, which is not many. The Valuer-General says it better than I can: "a relatively small number of sales, variations in the types of properties sold, and fluctuations at the suburb level may not accurately reflect genuine changes in market conditions… short-term movements should be viewed with caution."

My own read, for what it's worth: the gap between the cheapest and dearest suburb on that list is smaller than people expect, and it doesn't line up neatly with which school you're zoned to. Zoning is a real factor here. It is not the factor.

Does a school zone actually lift the price?

Honestly — there's less hard Adelaide-specific evidence than the confident claims you'll read suggest.

The most relevant published work is Domain's School Zones Report, 2023 edition. It found every Adelaide school catchment it analysed recorded positive house price growth, and that a higher share of secondary catchments outgrew their surrounding suburb than primary ones did. Its sharpest example was two schools in the same postcode moving at completely different rates — one catchment up 34% annually while the other rose 3%.

Two caveats I'd rather give you than have you find out later. That report's own methodology text refers to a window ending in 2021, so treat it as directional rather than current. And Domain hasn't published a newer edition — if you see a "2026 School Zones Report" quoted anywhere, it doesn't exist.

Research from further afield points the same direction at a smaller size: a 2021 study in the Journal of Housing Economics, co-authored by a University of Adelaide economist, found houses on the high-performing side of a primary school zone boundary sold for roughly 2.5% to 3.6% more than similar houses on the other side. That study used New South Wales data, not Adelaide.

So: a real effect, consistently found, and smaller than the folklore. Buy the house and the street first.

How I put this together

The zoning facts come from the Department for Education's live school-zone service — the same one behind its public finder — for the 2026 enrolment year, pulled on 1 October 2026. Zoned-or-not and capacity-management status are read straight from that data, not inferred from school websites, which carry template wording that says the same thing whether a school is zoned or not.

Which suburbs fall across which zones was worked out by overlaying the department's zone boundaries against the state's suburb boundaries. I've described those as splits rather than putting a percentage on them, because a land-area share isn't the same as a share of houses, and the only number that matters to you is what the finder says about your address.

Prices are the Valuer-General's published quarterly medians, which are free and public. I haven't blended them with any other provider's figures — those run on a rolling twelve-month basis and mixing the two makes a comparison that looks precise and isn't.

What I've left out on purpose: school performance tables. The cohorts at several local schools are small enough that one student shifts a headline percentage by several points, and I don't think an agent ranking schools to sell houses is a good look. If you want that data it's on the My School website, straight from the source.

The bottom line

Check the address, not the suburb — especially in Ridgehaven, Redwood Park, St Agnes, Surrey Downs and Modbury Heights, where the boundary runs through the middle.

Most local primary schools aren't zoned at all, so it comes down to road distance. No school around here is capacity managed, and the high school boundaries haven't moved in years.

And if a zone is genuinely make-or-break for your family, tell me before we start looking. It changes which streets I'd send you to.