Renting, selling, buying... help!

[BallroomWithNoBalls]

We are about to do up our house and sell it. We will move to a different town. The town we are moving to has good schools in the centre (and small houses), but the nicer houses are on the outskirts (easy to walk into the centre but the schools have small catchments).

We are considering renting a small house in the centre to get DD into the school, then buy a little further out. Another advantage is it would give us more time to suss out the new area and take the pressure off getting moved in somewhere before January schools applications time.

Can anyone see any pitfalls in this plan? Ok it's not the most moral thing to do, but screw morals for now. I know the rented house has to be provable to be our main family home but we should be ok to have sold up our current house by then, if building work all goes to plan.

Can we move once we hear which school we have been allocated? Or do we have to wait until dd has actually started at the school?

[PatriciaHolm]

Assuming the previous home is sold at the time of application, then applying from the rented property will be perfectly acceptable to the LEA.

However, the length of time you need to be there will vary by authority.

Some will want to see evidence of long term renting - a year's contract, for example; some will actually threaten to remove school places if you move before your child has started school - for example Solihull explicitly say

"If you move house after your child has been offered a place and there are children on the waiting list with a higher priority, your child's offer of a place will be withdrawn." Though I'm not sure this would actually stand up at appeal as they only have a short period of time to withdraw a place unless an application was actually fraudulent (e.g. you didn't actually live there at all). So in practise it may not happen, but I wouldn't like to go through the experience.

Just don't move between application and being given a place in April; this will often cause the first application to be cancelled and you will be treated as a late applicant at the new address.