We moved with a year 3 and year 1 child after COVID.
It hasn't been plain sailing, we chose a larger two class intake school as it seemed really exciting and we thought there would be a larger pool of children to find friends with. In hindsight I wish we had gone for a smaller school as I think it would have been a warmer more welcoming environment where their classmates had been more forced to join in.
My youngest had a hard time making friends partly because friendships were still at the stage where they were led by the mums getting together and as the mums weren't interested in opening up their group to me, my child was excluded from playdates.
Now in year 3 they are starting to make their own friends independent of their parents and they have a small group forming. But they cried many times over the last two years missing their previous school and home because they felt miserable and wanted to 'go home'. This has led to a lot of guilt for me as I was the driver behind the move to be nearer my family, bigger house, good schools etc.
My older child had a much smoother time despite being more introverted. This may have been because friendships hadn't formed so strongly due to the disruption of lockdowns so the dynamics of moving now may be different. But they quickly found a solid group of friends and have been pretty happy.
We are only 1 hour away from our former home so we have kept in touch with a couple of their key friends as meeting halfway is manageable, but over time the frequency of meet ups is waning. They both still talk about their old home and have been quite unsettled at times, partly because the house we bought needed major renovations so our stuff was in storage and we were in temporary accommodation for several months. I think getting a strong home base early on is very important and looking back I wish we had compromised on our dream home and instead bought a house that was ready to go.
Two years in it finally feels like we are settling, DH and I have both changed jobs to something more local (were hybrid remote working and long commute back to previous area for the first 18 months which was hard).
Volunteering at our children's activities has helped make us more visible in our community but it took over a year of reliably volunteering at my daughter's activity before I felt accepted. I think making friends and acquaintances ourselves is starting to benefit our children as we have finally been invited to a few social things as a family, so I wish we had prioritized this earlier.but there was a lot to manage with the move initially.
Overall, it was still the right move for our family and I can see a much brighter long term future with a safer area and better high school ahead. But i wasn't prepared for how hard it would be to integrate. We always said it was now or never if we had left it much longer it would be harder for the children to have left behind more established groups of friends.