Radley is mostly home-owning families and couples on comfortable incomes, plus several hundred boarding-school pupils who change every year. About three in four households own their home. A big chunk of the population lives in communal boarding houses. Close to four in ten adults have a degree. Without the college's boarders, the village would look about ten years older than the census makes it.
At the 2021 Census, 77% of Radley households owned their home and 17% rented privately, with the remaining 6% in social housing. Every population figure on this page comes from that census unless another source is named. In Radley the owners outnumber the landlords' tenants comfortably.
The median age in Radley is 37, and 17% of residents are aged 25 to 44. That median is pulled down by Radley College's boarders, who are counted as residents. The typical household is older than 37 suggests, and the college's admissions office does more to set the village's age profile than any of its families. The share of people in their late twenties to early forties is fairly small, and that fits a village where houses come up rarely and cost a lot when they do.
The Office for National Statistics models typical household income at about £70,000 a year before tax for the financial year to March 2023, averaged across a statistical area that extends beyond the village. After tax that's about £51,000, and the mortgage is paid out of the smaller number. That's comfortable money, as long as nobody is paying school fees.
Just over a quarter of Radley households, 29%, are one person living alone, and 13% are pensioners living alone, who are part of that 29%. Couples with dependent children make up 19% of households and lone parents 4%. Radley has a lot of bungalows, and the census suggests many of them are lived in by one person.
About 39% of Radley residents aged 16 and over hold a degree-level qualification, and 15% have no formal qualifications. The census puts full-time students at about 1%, but that only counts students who also work or are looking for work, so the hundreds of boarders at the college don't show up in it. Taken at face value, that figure would hide almost every student in the village.
Of Radley's 2,793 residents, 768 live in communal establishments, which here mostly means the college boarding houses, and 2,025 live in ordinary households. That's an unusual share for a village. In practice Radley is two populations sharing one set of statistics, a school that turns over every year and a settled village around it. Any percentage based on residents, especially anything about age, mixes the two. Household figures, like ownership and household make-up, describe only the 2,025 who live in the houses.
Radley's population is one of its real strengths. The households are mostly owner-occupied, well qualified and comfortably off, and they stay put while the college population changes around them.