Secondary applications, moving boroughs - help!

[MovingtoLondonAgain]

Our DD is starting year 7 secondary school in september 2019.

We are in the process of moving to the borough where the schools we put down are but due to a chain collapse we have been set back and likely won’t be in new home until after national offer day.

Would appreciate any experiences of changing address half way through the process please - thank you.

Do you have applied for schools in your new borough, but using your current address?

Yes, i have applied for schools in the borough I am moving to using my current address.

I live quite close to the border so three of them have previously - although not a lot - taken children from my current borough.

The other three are all less than a mile from where we were buying before chain collapsed and you need to be very near.

As it stands you will now be to late to make any alterations without you being classed as a late entry and therefore only be allocated a school after all others.
You only option is to stick with the three preferences that you have and see what happens. It is likely from your post that you will not get any of the three preferences as the address used will be that where you currently live. However the chance of a place is better than no place if you make any changes to the preferences now.
I think you need to assume that you will be allocated a place at a school near to where you currently live, which you should accept as a holding option. What you do need to be doing is ensuring that you have, if at all possible, moved before the 1st March date for announcement of places. That would mean you could immediately ask for the new address to be used on waiting lists etc.
If you go to appeal then the reason of a late house move will I am afraid carry little weight and you will need to look to identify good reasons for specific schools you chose rather than rely on unfortunate circumstances.

Thank you admission that is very helpful.

We have been lucky and have a new buyer quickly but have struggled a bit to find a house ourselves, so even in a short chain I would imagine it would be highly unlikely we would be in a new house by the 1st March

I assume after that it would be an in year transfer?

Until September it would simply be part of the process of allocating school places for year 7. It is normally referred to the block appeal process. After all the appeals and your child starts at a school in September it would then be considered an in-year appeal. If we assume that you do not get allocated any of your three preferences and you have not moved by 1st March, then you should accept the school that you are offered. This is simply to ensure that you do have, in the worst possible scenario, have a school place for September. If you reject the place offer then the LA as admission authority have done what they are legally expected to do and you will then have the problem of finding a school for your child.
Having confirmed acceptance of the not wanted school place, you should ensure that you are placed on the waiting list of all the three schools you want. Most LAs do automatically do this but some do not, so it is best to formally ask to go on the waiting list for the three schools in writing, so that you have a paper trail for appeal purposes. You should also then formally apply to appeal for a place at the same three schools. The waiting list and appeal procedure work in tandem but are totally separate processes.
You also need to check with the LA exactly when you can change your address. In theory it is the point at which your child is sleeping in the new address, however some LAs allow you to use other criteria, like having exchanged contracts. As soon as you can you should inform the LA of the change of address as this will in all probability get you further up the waiting list. The waiting list is held to December 31st of the year of entry in admission criteria order, so moving nearer to the school should improve your chances of getting an offer of a place.
The actual appeal process takes time but somewhere around May / June there will be an appeal hearing for all parents wanting to gain a place at each of the schools. Sorry there is no way around the fact that this takes time and is laborious but you need to appeal for each school separately.

The other thing to be careful about is that you have an automatic right of appeal for school places but there is also a rule that says that you can only have one appeal per school per academic year unless there has been a significant change in your circumstances . So in the period from March to September you can appeal using your old address, if you have not moved, but you would not then be allowed to appeal again in September using the old address. A change of address is however considered a significant change, so if that is before the "block appeal" you would be appealing from the new address and same applies you cannot have a "second bite of the cherry in September." If however the appeal is using the old address because you have not moved, then subsequent to the appeal you move then you can apply for a second appeal. That is probably a good reason to not on the initial appeal document say a reason is you are moving, just talk about the schools you want are better schools for your child.

When we listed our school preferences in October we had plans to move and had an offer in on a house in our new area. We listed schools in the new area and a 'banker' in our current area just in case.

We moved in the February after a few delays.

I contacted the new LA to see if there was anything we could do, but Feb was too late to make any changes. Our application was for our old address. We sent the LA our new details to update their records and prove our new address.

As predicted, we were offered the banker from our old address, not our first choices in the new area. We automatically went on the waiting list of our preferred school and because we were now close we were offered a place in the March/April when all parents had accepted or declined places.