OK think this is going to be long so bear with me.
DH and I lived in Gloucestershire for 4 years and still have our house there which we rent out. We moved to our current home in SW London whe I was pregnant with ds1 but did not even consider schools, just fell in love with the house and the area.
So we started to do nursery applications for ds1 and it turns out we are in possibly one of the worst places to get your child into a school. We thought we could get into the Catholic school (we are practicing Catholics) but turns out we are one road out of living in the correct parish. A good few people that we know who did school applications this year didn't get offered anything and are having to go through appeal.
We can't afford to move to a better catchment area here as it is so expensive so we then looked into moving back to Cheltenham where we have a lovely but smaller house and a brilliant school 400m from the house. This is possibe without dh having to change jobs. However a house that needs completely redoing has just come on the market. It is within our price range and would take us into catchment. The house is slightly bigger than what we have now but a smaller garden and would mean possibly renting for 6 months while the work is done.
Other things to consider; family all very near to us here and are very hands on. No guarantee to get into either school even if we move.
What would you do? I can't decide neither can DH...