Moving to Whitley Bay: schools

[pongopossum]

We're currently considering moving to the Whitley Bay area, which would mean moving our daughter to a new school. She's actually only due to start school this September, but for a number of reasons the move wouldn't be until next year at the earliest, so she would of course have started school by then.

Looking for a 3 bed house for around £250k. The areas around Whitley Bay and Cullercoats Metro stations look promising.

Just wondering if anyone else has moved to Whitley Bay with kids in-tow, part-way through a school year, and how easy it has been to get into one of the decent local primaries that feed into the equally decent local secondaries?

What I don't want to happen is that we end up not getting into one of the local schools, and get offered something much further west into North Tyneside (Wallsend, Shiremoor, etc). Does anyone know how likely this is?

Saw that there had been no response to this. So as you've worked out all the coast primaries have and excellent reputation and are very popular. If they did offer you a mid term place, it likely wouldn't be as far away as Shiremoor or wallsend. You'd then have to sit tight for a space to come up on the waiting list for a closer school. They do come up. For your house search area you are looking at Cullercoats Primary up to 11 (feeds in to secondary school), and Marine Park and Rockcliffe First school (these feed into the Whitley Bay middle school system), probably Marden Middle for your search area.

I have friends who moved mid tem with their boys and they got a Y1 place at Appletree Gardens, straight away and moved to Marine their catchment school at the beginning of year 2 when they had a space