Moving back to London/UK or wider Europe from Aus?

[aplamp]

My husband and I are dual UK / Australian citizens, currently living in Aus. I spent many years in London and still have family and friends there. We now have 8 & 6-year old sons and we're getting the itch to head back for a while. What neighbourhoods for schooling / specific schools would you recommend? I know London well but have no idea about London with kids. I also haven't lived there for the last 11 years and know things have changed. Our kids are chilled out, friendly and very, very soft. Don't want to crush their spirits by messing this up!! 😂

Alternatively we're happy to look at other UK cities. In a perfect world we'd love something further afield in Europe, but post-Brexit obviously that's a lot more complex. We work in tech though so not impossible... but obviously cities with a strong tech scene would be ideal.

I know that budget is massively important, we can afford nice but not corporate lawyer nice. Happy to spend more than is sensible in rent for a good area as it'll only be for a year or two (keeping our place here to come back to).

Open to any suggestions / recommendations / warnings! Apologies for the ridiculously broad question - we're at the very beginning of planning. Thanks so much 😊

Surely in London is all comes down to budget? North/south of the river?

Amsterdam. Lots of tech jobs, English is the business language, great place to bring up kids, wonderful city.

Coming here for 2 years, that's just long enough to screw your kids up.

Unless you are going private the school(s) your children attend will be where the council has spaces so you could end up with them in different schools and they could be miles away.

What are you going to do about pre and post school childcare?

How are you going to keep your kids entertained in the winter? In London you are not likely to have much of a garden / yard and it is dark from 4pm to 8am in winter.

Have you heard of the 'cost of living crisis'? Fuel bills are through the roof and will be going up again in the Autumn. Can you remember how cold it can get in the UK? (Apologies if you are in Tassie) Unless you are on a good income you will not be able to keep the heating on all the time. I'm single, in a house that holds heat it is so well insulated and I pay £120 - £150 per month on gas and electricity.

Food prices are going up due to Brexit, the pandemic, a war in Ukraine and who knows what will be next.

I'm sorry to sound so negative but life in London when you are single or a couple is different to being in London with children.

Another one for Amsterdam.

Thank you all for your thoughts so far! Yes I have read a lot about life getting very difficult for a lot of people over there, I know it's just really hard to get a feel for things 'on the ground' from reading the news. Amsterdam was somewhere else we were looking at, sounds like that's the better bet.

Re. London & budget, I was thinking north of the river, east or north. Aware the budget makes a huge difference, so interested to see how much you end up paying for kid-friendly areas essentially to see if it's viable. We're in Sydney so used to things being somewhat expensive, but also warm 😂

OP, I think it's important to take some of these comments with a grain of salt. The cost of living crisis is not unique to the UK, it is happening all over Europe and elsewhere too. In the country where I live, inflation is sky high right now. Inflation is soaring in the Netherlands. But the British media is probably the most doom and gloom / sensationalist media of any country in the English speaking world,so things are always painted to be a thousand times worse there than anywhere else.

As for comments like "how will you keep children entertained in London in the winter", I'm baffled. Indeed, how to keep children entertained in one of the most vibrant and exciting cities on earth. Total head scratcher.

I’m a Londoner born and bred, but spent some of my childhood in The Hague. Go to the Netherlands if yiu can!

I was also born in London... and my parents moved to Aus 'for the kids' when I was 6 😂

I love London dearly, went to uni and started my career there, met my husband, but yes totally get that with kids it'd be completely different, even if the world wasn't falling apart. Our kids are into museums, making things, reading etc... I'm sure they'd be pretty blown away with what is on offer there so not too worried about that but yes I've heard getting school places etc can be really tricky.

Nothing works here anymore unless you go private or pay through the nose. Education, healthcare, emergency services, any public service (passports being the latest good example, see also immigration at airports), customer service (don’t think I’ve got through to a phone line in less than 30 mins all year), airports and airlines, public transport isn’t too bad but costs a fortune. House prices are sky high (nearly 9 times avg salary for avg house), rents too. Inflation and cost of living will be a nightmare this year. Politics broken, where does it end?

Most things are still available to those who’ll look and pay a premium otherwise no one is interested in you.

I wouldn’t come here if I had the choice to be elsewhere.

House prices are sky high in Sydney.
Surely Northern Europe is affected by high fuel/ heating costs - unless they buy electricity from France which is nuclear.

London is an amazing city for kids. Yes the weather and the costs will be downsides (though I believe Sydney is v expensive too). And school places are likely to be difficult. But it could still be a great couple of years for them, especially if they love museums.

There are family friendly areas all over the city and although budget matters so do lots of other things like how central you want to be, whether you need easy access to the tube or will use other transport, what kind of housing stock you like and what you want nearby.

So for me, some good options are Crouch End, Greenwich, Wanstead and Richmond. But all of these have downsides that would bother some people (no tube, lots of tourists, less central, plane noise respectively) so worth thinking about what matters most to you.

Can you afford private school? Because if not, I'm not sure it's doable. Good state schools are typically oversubscribed

Unless you are going private the school(s) your children attend will be where the council has spaces so you could end up with them in different schools and they could be miles away.

There is lots of movement in London schools.

What are you going to do about pre and post school childcare?

same things as millions of other parents

How are you going to keep your kids entertained in the winter? In London you are not likely to have much of a garden / yard and it is dark from 4pm to 8am in winter.

again see above plus plenty of gardens in London & I'm sure places outside of London also experience winter.

My only question OP is why move for two years?

I was born & raised in London as our my dc. We turned out ok I think 😆

But I do agree it's very expensive & not good value for money these days.

As for comments like "how will you keep children entertained in London in the winter", I'm baffled. Indeed, how to keep children entertained in one of the most vibrant and exciting cities on earth. Total head scratcher.

OK imagine it's 6pm, you have just get home from work and collected the children, it is November, it is dark and cold. Are you really going to set off for central London to take in a show or visit a museum?

If you do go for a show then you are looking at £100+.

There’s literally more to do in London with kids in winter than probably any other city on earth. And lots of it is free too. So don’t let the idea you’ll all be sitting in a cold dark house with no garden and nothing to do for 6 months of the year put you off!

There’s a million clubs and activities to join if you / your kids want to. Literally anything and everything.

I’m Aus / U.K. too and here in London for two decades now

it might be hard on the dc to do such big moves?

also in London it can be hard to get into oversubscribed state

Absolutely to both, London is thriving atm

and don’t look to mn as it’s very depressive overall. What I see irl is different

Have you heard of the 'cost of living crisis'? Fuel bills are through the roof and will be going up again in the Autumn. Can you remember how cold it can get in the UK? (Apologies if you are in Tassie) Unless you are on a good income you will not be able to keep the heating on all the time. I'm single, in a house that holds heat it is so well insulated and I pay £120 - £150 per month on gas and electricity.
Depends on the house, but my new build house is much easier to keep warm than my Sydney fibro ever was! Climate meant only a couple of months of winter where it could drop to single digits inside, so you just survived it with a hot water bottle and wool blankets (rather than try to heat the whole street with an oil filled electric radiator). Having no heating in the UK of course is not comparable but with central heating, double glazing and insulation my direct debit is £105 and the house is much more comfortable than my Sydney one year round.

Astonished by the comment about what to do with kids after 6pm in winter! What do any of us do?

Just a thought OP about other cities in the UK. You might find living elsewhere interesting if you have total freedom. Edinburgh? Manchester? Bristol? All connected to different bits of the UK. London of course has a lot to do but maybe worth checking some of these out too. I lived in London happily for a long time but like other cities too.

OK imagine it's 6pm, you have just get home from work and collected the children, it is November, it is dark and cold. Are you really going to set off for central London to take in a show or visit a museum?

Err, dinner, bath & book & bedtime regardless of weather surely.

Depends on your budget (we paid private school fees but plenty of people use state schools). It is better to disrupt your children at their primary school age than when they get closer to 11+ and schools and teenager relationships but be aware that the 8 year old when 10 may well not want to leave London for another country as children get much less moveable as they get older and more damaged by moves.

There are some pretty rough state primary schools in London unless you pick an area very carefully and the nicer the area the higher the rents will be. You might in fact want to move a bit further out - we live in zone 5 of London underground and whilst it is not inner London it is a bit more family orientated than some parts of inner London. David Cameron sent children to a state school in Kensington for a time (very hard to get into that one). Tony Blair whose children were Catholic used Catholic state schools. You might want to live even further out in somewhere like St Albans even as trains to London are quite fast but instead might prefer an inner London vibe.

Basically you have a vast selection of state primary schools in London but it is hard to get into the good ones. Some people starting going to church when the baby is born even and have it baptised almost immediately it is born and play roles in the church in order to get into certain state church schools for example.

This is arrant nonsense. London is full of some excellent primary schools. Definitely worth researching options before you move so you can consider them but most areas of London have a variety of options. There’s a lot of movement in London so finding places higher up the school is nowhere near as difficult as initial entry into some of the more popular ones (which more often relies on distance to them than church attendance as most are not affiliated to a church). Plenty of them will have places for year 3 up. We lived in a great part of zone 2 and you would have had no trouble at all finding places for your kids in a nice school.

Places like St Albans on the other hand, as well as not being remotely the city vibe you’re looking for, are filling their schools right now with all the kids leaving London.