Primary schools in SW12

[dinosaurinmybelly]

Hello - bit of an odd situation if anyone can offer advice -

We are currently living abroad and hope to return to our home in SW12 (we have rented it out) in July 2011. By then we will have a child aged 7 and another who would be due to start primary school that September (2011).

(1) Does anyone have experience of moving into SW12 and getting a place for an older child at one of the state or independent schools? Ideally the 2 children would go to the same school.

(2) We will be coming back after the application period for state schools. We own our house in SW12 (and lived there for 6 years before our 4 year stint of working abroad), but are renting it out as I mentioned. Does anyone know if this makes us ineligible for the normal state school application for Sep11?

you can't apply for the state school place until you are in your house

however they will add you to the wait lists when you arrive and usually they slot you in according to the admission criteria eg distance

do you know which schools you are after? the council should know if the class for the 7 year old is likely to be full or not

if you can get the 7 year old in then your reception child would get sibling priority

Thankyou EldonAve -

I hadn't thought about the sibling criteria. That is a really good point. I must start phoning around the various schools. I had hoped for Holy Ghost, Honeywell or Bellevue in the area, but understand they are massively oversubscribed and from reading other threads we won't make the cut at Holy Ghost as we haven't been going there to church regularly. Distance will be an issue for Honeywell and Bellevue, although I hear that the waitlists sometimes go down really fast in those in the month of August.
Aside from those, I'm at a loss - I've heard some good things about Ravenstone so I will also look into that, and then of course on the independent schools there is Hornsby House and Oliver House. Have you heard how things are going at Oliver House recently? It was a very new school when we left.

Belleville expanded last year as there was such a shortage of places
The council website will list the distances for Honeywell & Belleville

For HG if you have been regularly worshipping elsewhere before you move & can get a reference you may get a shot

Ravenstone has a good rep but again the catchment is shrinking

I don't know anyone with kids at OH so can't comment there