Moving house for a secondary school - is there any reason this is a bad idea?

[RubaiyatOfAnyone]

My children’s current primary school is excellent, but the two closest secondaries are worse than useless and the one a bit further away is hugely oversubscribed as a result (and we are obviously not it’s closest catchment). Dd is yr 5.

there is a very good secondary school 12 mins drive away, but it has a list of prioritised towns/villages as catchment and we are not one of them.

If we were to move to the town it is in, hopefully we’d get in (there is one other, also very good, school in that town as a back up). we might not be able to sell our own house straight away but would move first, as our house is awkward to sell.

if we were to do this, is there any reason the school would frown on our application? I vaguely remember horror stories of them checking whether you moved in the last 2 years, but does that really happen?

Here is depends if the old house is "available to you". So if rented out officially (proper tenancy agreement) and you've made an HMRC election that new house is only or main residence then you're ok.

I know that renting in a new area whilst still owning the old house would be a no-no

Not automatically.

We did exactly that. We moved in the autumn of Year 6...still owned our house, it wasn't even up for sale...and we moved into a rented house in a different catchment.

The new school (which is very sought after) wanted a Council Tax bill, which they got. That was it. It's not always a problem by any means.

I guess it’s not very common to own two houses fairly close together.You may need to get an answer in writing specifically for you.